Quotes About Forgetting

In two years' time, my scar became pale and shinny and I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

Because I don't want to remember, he answered. If I did, I might keep the future from happening by letting the past encroach upon it. I create each hour's newness by forgetting yesterday completely. Having been happy is never enough for me. I don't believe in dead things. What's the difference between no longer being and never having been?

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.

The mind wants to forget because it weighs so much on the heart and soul. I am tired of crying and feeling so helpless. I want to breathe again -just for a little while.

You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.

The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.

All this BSC pressure was getting to me. I was forgetting how to be a good sitter. Or maybe I had never been one to begin with. Maybe that's why the club was falling apart. Maybe I needed to back off baby-sitting for a while. As I walked home, I felt about two inches tall.

This is the last time, the girl thought, that she would remember these things. If they floated back to her again, she would paddle away. When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. But even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below. Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it, the only one that can ever get you home.

There were lots of ways to love someone, I guessed, both by remembering and forgetting.

The past was always present, in its way, and you can't help but remember. Even if you can't remember at all.

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come. T. E. LAWRENCE, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, 1916

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

This is life … to play the game, to play the cards we get; play them uncomplainingly and play them to the end. The game may not be worth the while. The stakes may not be worth the winning. But the playing of the game is the forgetting of self, and we should be game sports and play it bravely to the end.

For this is action, this not being sure, this carelessPreparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,Making ready to forget, and always coming backTo the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.

It's odd, but people are capable of forgetting quite extraordinary occurrences very quickly if it makes them happier to do so

Leo muchísimo pero sin ningún orden, y olvido lo que leo.

Alguna vez te encontrarás frente a tus acciones convertidas en piedras irrevocables como ésa, me dijeron de niña al enseñarme la imagen de un dios, que ahora no recuerdo cuál era. Todo se olvida, pero se olvida sólo por un tiempo. En aquel entonces también las palabras me parecieron de piedra, sólo que de una piedra fluida y cristalina. La piedra se solidificaba al terminar cada palabra, para quedar escrita para siempre en el tiempo

Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.

If a man owes me money, I never seem to forget. But if I do the owing, I somehow never remember.

No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.