The sentence copied from memory may reveal what you needed it to mean.

Memory does not store words, it stores usefulness. When you write down a line you have carried for years and then find the original, the differences are rarely random. You will have added a softening, removed a condition, or turned a description into a promise, and the direction of the change says something about what you were looking for. Getting it wrong in that particular way is a kind of information about yourself.

Write out a saying you live by without checking it first. Then look it up and pay attention to what your version added or quietly dropped.