“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present." by Mario Vargas Llosa?

Mario Vargas Llosa 30

Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist 1936

Related quotes

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

Henri Bergson book Matter and Memory

Source: Matter and Memory

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past. (1954), p. 75”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”

Golda Meir book My Life

My Life (1975), p. 231

“Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Prologue (p. 463)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

“Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

“The real is the present, conceived not as a mathematical point between the present and the past, but as the union of present and past in a duration or permanence that is at the same time change. Thus the past as past and the future as future do not exist at all, but are purely ideal; the past as living in the present and the future as germinating in the present are wholly real and indeed are just the present itself. It is because of the presence of these two elements in the present… that the present is a concrete and changing reality and not an empty mathematical point.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.

“The pure memories given
To help our joy on earth, when earth is past,
Shall help our joy in heaven.”

Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897) American writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 407.

“Such is the citadel of loving Souls where all pure intellects are united, in one simple Purity. This is the habitation of God in us, where none can operate but God alone; its Purity is eternal, there is neither time nor space, past nor future, always present and ready to be revealed to those pure intelligences raised to it.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 149

“We are quick to forgive and forget about the past, or our memories when we find the present satisfying.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Mario Vargas Llosa 30

Related quotes

Related topics