Quotes About Forgetting

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient—it's not useful—to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

Vivimos con suposiciones muy fáciles, ¿no? Por ejemplo, que la memoria es igual a sucesos más tiempo. Pero es algo mucho más extraño. ¿Quién dijo que la memoria es lo que creíamos que habíamos olvidado? Y debería ser obvio que el tiempo no actúa como un fijador, sino más bien como un disolvente. Pero no conviene —no es útil— creer esto; no nos ayuda a seguir adelante; por lo tanto, lo pasamos por alto.

Así es cómo funciona el olvido: eliminando el pasado y no hablando nunca de él.

It's an established theory in infant psychology that the human animal can validate his ego only through the eyes of others. Have you ever seen the expressions of imbeciles or schizophrenics? If the roadway is left blocked too long, one ultimately quite forgets there is one.

After we're done, I want you to forget the whole thing … that we ever even met." "That's all right by me. Anyway, it doesn't look like something I'll want to remember.

It is the doom of men that they forget.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Remind a man of what he remembers, and you will make him forget it.

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

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

And if no Lethe flows beneath your casement, And when ten years have not brought full effacement, Philosophy was wrong, and you may meet.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Forgiving is all forgetting is another thing.

Mourning is not forgetting. ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

hacernos olvidar las dichas transformadas en desdichas es una bendición de la amnesia.

And this book was an attempt to be with these feelings, also to find a place that will allow both to remember all the time without dying of it and to forget without killing.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

Eventually all of that pain and anger just sort of fades away, and all we're left with is growing old and forgetting.

Facebook, with its flow of useless particularity, makes it impossible to forget, thus impossible to remember.

Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia».