Quotes About Forgetting

A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture…

Only through the pure contemplation . . . which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the pre-eminent ability for such contemplation. . . . (T)his demands a complete forgetting of our own person.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know.

She wondered how to un-know certain things

She had forgotten every problem, person and event behind her; they had always been clouded in her sight, to be hurried past, to be brushed aside, never final, never quite real. This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live—she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this.

according to Lem's Law, 'No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets' -- owing to general lack of time, the oversupply of books, and the perfection of advertising.

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. Awareness begins with remembering what we tend to forget. Drifting through life on a cushioned surge of impulses is but one of many strategies of forgetting. Not only do we forget to remember, we forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas.

Five million years was plenty of time to forget, as you evolved or devolved or whatever the hell.

Those who remember, remembered live on; those who forget, forgotten are gone.

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

Your advantage in forgetting is that you'll forget to write yourself off as a lost cause.

In real life, you don't get to choose what you forget.

sin la memoria, sería aún más angustiosa la vida, aunque tal vez sea aún más angustioso darse cuenta de que cuanto más crece nuestra memoria, más crece nuestra muerte. Porque el hombre no es más que una máquina de recordar y de olvidar que camina hacia la muerte. Y no digo esto con tristeza porque también es cierto que la memoria, disfrazándose de vida, convierte la muerte en algo sutil y tenue.

Erinnern das ist vielleicht die qualvollste Art des Vergessens und vielleicht die freundlichste Art der Linderung dieser Qual

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

I have purred? Guilt ripped her belly. It's like I'm already forgetting him.

The legitimacy of the government depends on the continuous exercise of an act of forgetting.

Ursula K. Le Guin: "One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery.")

I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it's done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions.

When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice. The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men--he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

I've had mostly book parties, where I get very focused on inviting everyone and not forgetting anyone, although of course one always does, and being worried no one will show up, but mostly the book comes from going to parties and feeling very, for lack of a better word, anxious.

We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.