There either is or is not a way things are. The color of the day. How it felt to be a child. The feeling of saltwater on your sunburned legs. Sometimes the water is yellow. Sometimes it's red. The color in memory depends on the day. I'm not gonna tell the story the way it happened. I'm gonna tell it the way I remember it.
Don't you understand that everything I do, I do it for you? Anything that might be special in me is you. (Finnegan Bell/Ethan Hawke in Great Expectations, dir. Alfonso Cuaron/1998)Great expectations, huge disappointments! Or the way Roger Ebert puts it: This is not, says Finn, the way the story really happened, but the way he remembers it. That is how everyone tells the stories that matter to them: through their own eyes, rewritten by their own memories, with bold underscores for the parts that hurt.