Quotes About Forgetting

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten—a principle that applies to nations as well as individuals.

Lucian doesn't seem to have mastered the English language but is fast forgetting all his German; this seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.

You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far tricker matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remeber, and to the Outside to call them to harsh accout. One hundred Heavens . . . for one thousand Hells.

But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting.

I note that I've lived longer in the past now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn't mind forgetting more of it.

You forget the life you had before, after awhile. Things you cherish and hold dear are like pearls on a string. Cut the knot and they scatter across the floor, rolling into dark corners never to be found again. So you move on, and eventually you forget what the pearls even looked like. At least, you try.

How to tell her in words, then, what he had learned himself by pain and grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget—and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.

what he had learned himself by pain and grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget – and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.

That only by forgiveness could she forget - and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.

How to tell her in words, then, what he had learned himself by pain and grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget—and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice. Perhaps

I watch all of the Q episodes. I just don't remember them after I've turned off the television.

Todo se olvida, muchacha. Olvidamos hasta la muerte de nuestros seres queridos, que es la mayor desgracia que puede acaecernos.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;

How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too.

I'd have never thought that remembering would bring with it far more trouble than forgetting.

We get used to seeing the patients ill; even used to them dying. When they do we get upset if we know them. We can't get upset for those we don't know. We have to forget them. We'd all have nervous breakdowns if we didn't.

And I thought—not for the first time—that forgiving and forgetting aren't mutually exclusive.

in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.

Josie started being able to sleep through the night again, instead of waking up screaming. Part of going back to normal meant erasing the boundaries of what was abnormal, and within a few months, the way Alex had felt on 9/11 was slowly forgotten, like a tide washing out a message she'd once scrawled on the sand.