David Carr Quotes

In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.

Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot.

End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.

Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history - the facts of what happened is both immutable and mostly unknowable.

If marriage is about deciding to love on a daily basis, I have woken up to a no-brainer every day since.

Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril.

We live in an age where there is a firehose of information, and there is no hierarchy of what is important and what is not. Where the truth is often fashioned through a variety of digital means. Are you your avatar? Who are you in social media? What face do you turn toward the world? How much does it have in common with who you actually are?

As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

When people fear for their futures, they like to gather in a dark room and stare at a screen, holding hands against the gloom.

[C]ivilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I've watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?

We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

The eyes that saw too much because they did not close enough.

Necessity is a mother.

Most of my stories are not nice ones, their heroic aspects dimmed by the fact that the hand which struck me was my own. Truly ennobling narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt him, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire.

Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.

This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them
the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.

It wasn't that I wanted to be a writer; I just didn't want to be stupid.

There is no such thing as a social crack user.