Quotes About Erasure

about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call "femicide." Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners, seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.

The sheer differentness of the past, the reminder that everything changes, has always felt liberatory to me; to know that this moment will pass is freeing. There have been, there will be, other ways to be human. But the loss that is not gradual evolution but evition and erasure is not liberatory at all.

The sheer differentness of the past, the reminder that everything changes, has always felt liberatory to me; to know that this moment will pass is freeing. There have been, there will be, other ways to be human. But the loss that is not gradual evolution but eviction and erasure is not liberatory at all.

My memories will be erased and then I'll be force-fed the story from the society pages?

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

When I erase a word with a pencil, where does it go?

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

This was how people disappeared from history, wasn't it? They weren't erased, they were explained away.

Once upon a time Jackson had erased his past, now his past had erased him.

We can't just erase the history we don't like, then there won't be any lessons to be learned.

I wanted to be physically erased and start over again. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to be there. I guess I wanted to be nowhere, I wanted to listen to my brain talk inside of nothingness. I wanted to be untouchable and have no need.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grain of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.

Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he never was.

She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.

Five years from now, we'll all be erased," Jocelyn says, and we all sort of laugh. It's not funny, and yet it kind of is.

And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

I don't know if there's anything Kanye West can do that can erase his influence on me, because it's here. It's already there. He can't even reverse that himself, because it's just so ingrained in me.

When Leopold turned over his colony to Belgium he burned all the state records, declaring, 'I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.') Truly, this is the aching heart of the story: how a population comprised of millions of souls, spread over nearly a million square miles, rich in language and music and deeply honored traditions, can be muted and erased.

the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

Was this where my fascination for documented history came from? From a family so afraid of earthly erasure that they couldn't discard the transcript of ordering two pounds of prosciutto on June 15, 1988?

Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.

There are moments in life that you wish with all your heart you could take back. Like, just erase from existence. Like, if you could, you'd raise yourself right out of existence too, just to make that moment not exist.

If there was a way for me to unsee it, I would.