"Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present.   Beware of the most honest broker.  Remember that what you are told is really threefold:  shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"Memory has its own special kind.  It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
—Salman Rushdie