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Forgetting Quotes

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Forgetting Quotes

“In a few weeks almost everyone’s gonna forget about the Beirut bombing, like we forgot about the ever-incoming nuke, like we forgot about the President campaigning on student loan forgiveness, like we forgot about the actor who said not enough Jews died in the Holocaust and that he hoped his wife got gang raped, like how each new President makes the other Presidents look kinder and gentler, like we forget about war crimes, like we forget about the secret police, like we forget about the homeless when we can’t see them, like we forget what it’s like to be poor to be hungry the minute we have food we have money, like we forgot about Three Mile Island, like we forgot that fall and spring used to be as long as winter and summer like we forgot we could do something about this, like we forget about anything we don’t turn into a holiday and remember only the signs and symbols of the horror, like we forget each time we remember that it’s not that we forget, it’s that there are just too many tragedies, every week, forever and ever, and to remember them all would kill you. Your heart would break and stop beating and you'd die. So we forget.”

LifeInspirationalHistoryForgetting
Book:Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World
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“Many seed savers see themselves as stewards, not only of their own family memories but of the shared stories and genetic codes contained within these plants. This kind of recollection works against collective forgetting and the widespread disappearance of so many agricultural plants and animals. Old localized, traditional varieties of plants and animals fell (or were pushed) out of everyday use as agriculture became increasingly large scale, industrialized, and standardized, relying on ever fewer varieties in order to achieve the high levels of uniformity and predictability expected not only by stockholders but also by grocery store shoppers. The loss of biodiversity also means a broader form of forgetting.”

FoodMemoryForgettingFood Anthropology
Book:Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods
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“While this book focuses on the heirloom food movement, I argue that edible memory is far more expansive than simply the way people treat old-fashioned tomatoes or apples. Based on my observations, edible memory is something people enact with regard to a whole range of foods--including some of the most highly processed foods around. The heirloom varieties I focus on in most of this book are a particularly charged site of the intersections of food, memory, and meaning, but they serve as one rich example of a much larger process.”

FoodMemoryForgettingFood Anthropology
Book:Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods
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“That's one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he'll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he'll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman -- if he ever knew, he has forgotten. 'Move on!' you tell us. 'Move on! Forget what we've done to you. Tomorrow's another day!' But it isn't, Mr. Brue. Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That's the point I was making to you. And the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.”

OppressionIranForgettingEnglishVictimsIrishBritish Imperialism
Book:A Most Wanted Man
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“Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me - halting, hesitating - that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.”

PregnancyWomens RightsForgettingComplicityIrish HistoryUnmarried WomenSilencing WomenMagdalene Laundries
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“We forget all the time. We forget very nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we pid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbage - which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention - the constant replaying of the past - is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to, the exact wording kf the paragraph that you have just read... gone.”

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Book:The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
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“Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself. Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.”

LonelinessForgettingRemembering
Book:The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
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“I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”

LonelinessIllusionRejectionCompanionshipForgettingClosenessSlipping AwayKnowing SomeoneGrowing ApartDistancing Self
Book:The Night in Lisbon
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“I won't be seeing you again," he said. "It's just as well. I've told you too much to want to see you again." I wasn't so sure of that. It seemed possible that he would want to see me later on for that very reason. I alone, he believed, possessed an unfalsified image of his life. But that could make him hate me; perhaps he would feel that I had taken his wife from him, this time irrevocably—if he really believed that his own memory deceived him and only mine remained clear.”

MemoryStorytellingFarewellForgettingRememberingGoodbyesSharing LifeSharing Secrets
Book:The Night in Lisbon
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“Iraq has been forgotten. Even worse, or perhaps precisely because of this forgetting, many new Iraqs have been destroyed and added to the imperial list of oppression and domination since 2003. But, how can Iraq be forgotten? Isn’t forgetting it precisely the reason why many other Iraqs are being created around us without having enough people take notice? Are there still some naïve people out there who believe that what happened there will not happen here, albeit in a different shape or form? Are there any naïve people who believe that humanity can go on surviving with this brutal war machine? Are there still naïve people who divide our planet into 'here' and 'there'?”

WarIraqPropagandaMiddle EastForgettingIraq WarRememberingDecolonizationMiddle East Conflict
Author:Louis Yako
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“Harry Stickles certainly did possess quite a number of peculiarities which would have been nerve-racking to any less well-constituted girl. These nasty little ways were made worse by the man's preposterous and incredible conceit. But Nancy had been given by Nature one supreme gift—wherein only one other person in Glastonbury rivalled her, and that was John Crow—the gift of forgetting.”

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Book:A Glastonbury Romance
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“You don’t realise until you have no memories at all that you are a product of them. When you are an empty sheet of paper, you can’t even relate to yourself let alone to anyone else. You have no north and south. No right or left. You don’t know how to think and you don’t know what you think. Now that I have remembered things – I think – I wonder if I was better off not knowing.”

MemoriesForgettingRemembering
Book:The Last Thing I Remember
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“I couldn't under stand anything I saw in the picture at all. How could the players care, after the way they had humiliated themselves (and, of course, me) seven days - seven days - before? Why would any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a time, trying to detect somewhere within it any evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none: apparently everyone had forgotten except me.”

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Book:Fever Pitch
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“Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he’ll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you. And when he has one, his great-grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman—” He flung up his hands in mock ignorance. “If he ever knew, he has forgotten. ‘Move on!’ you tell us. ‘Move on! Forget what we’ve done to you. Tomorrow’s another day!’ But it isn’t, Mr. Brue.” He still had Brue’s hand. “Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That is the point I was making to you. And by the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.”

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Book:A Most Wanted Man
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