Quotessence
Home / Topics / Forgetting Quotes

Forgetting Quotes

Browse 374 quotes about Forgetting.

Forgetting Quotes

“When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, "If you had to retain everything, you’d explode. There’s simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.”

MemoryForgetting
Book:Roads to Berlin
Create image

“She goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before, I go on like before, alone in the field. It’s like my head had been lowered, And if I think this, and raise my head And the golden sun dries the need to cry I can’t stop having. How vast the field and interior love... ! I look, and I forget, like dryness where there was water and trees losing their leaves.”

LoveTruthWonderSeeingLongingFeelingForgettingPaganismPantheismOut Of Love
Book:O Pastor Amoroso
Create image

“I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.”

BookPastMusicYouthTravelMemoryInnocenceEmptinessNothingnessBeingForgettingRosesRoadVacuityBeing And NothingnessRoad Novel
Book:Beginner's Luke
Create image

“. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonement finite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preserving will not permit forgetting; destroying only when we can no longer beg or argue with time to preserve the brief benisons a few moments longer than our sins”

TimeSorrowPreservationBlessingsForgettingAtonementRememberingRenunciationInevitabilitySinsPleading
Book:paulinskill hours and other poems
Create image

“Too late for that now,” the Eldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name, and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s money for money’s sake, brown paper envelopes stuffed full of bribes—the turn of mind that says that the old’s only good for theme parks, and the new is all there needs to be. It’s been getting stronger and stronger all this while.And now that it’s more important to the people living in the city than we are, it’s become physically real.”

TransformationGreedForgetting
Book:Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy
Create image

“Thank god for Vegas. Seriously. A lobotomy wasn’t as effective as a weekend three hours of Red Bull away (from LA, not Pismo) where I wore the thinnest pinned stilettos, gambled like a sweaty degenerate mobster in black loafers, drank like Amy Winehouse and Charles Bukowski’s baby, and snorted throat-dripping lines of coke in a Hard Rock Hotel bathroom with four new best friends. I’d giddily rub off any one of those from the to-do list I wrote in eyeliner on my hotel bathroom mirror.”

LoveDrinkingDrunkVegasForgettingUnrequitedHard RockPartyingBathroomsDont CareStilettos And Scars
Book:Unrequited - One Girl, Thirteen Boyfriends, and Vodka.
Create image

“Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.”

ForgettingProcessingSensory Overload
Book:The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Create image

“It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

MemoryForgettingSilence Speaks
Author:Tan Twan Eng
Create image

“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind— But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss!—That thought's return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.”

PoetryLossGriefMemoryForgetting
Book:The Works of William Wordsworth
Create image

“Sorrow in the Heart of an Apple” I tidied my old sorrow, wrapped it gently in scented cloth, and buried it beneath the apple tree in our village orchard. Seasons rolled by... And I believed it was finished, forgotten, even the burial site lost to memory. Then came harvest. I plucked a red apple— shiny, luscious, radiant with promise. But with the first bite, I tasted it. That same sorrow, aged but unmistakable. It had not only survived— it had multiplied. Now here I am, face to face again, finding it in the heart of every apple.”

LifeLife LessonsLossGriefMemoryTraumaForgettingArabic PoetryArabic LiteratureThe Human Condition
Book:سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]
Create image

“Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.”

DeathGriefSorrowEndureMemoryForgettingRemembering
Book:Serena
Create image

“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.”

DeathMoralityMurderKillingForgettingRememberingMutualityAcknowledging
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness. How very clean. Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”

WritingDeathInternetMemoryDustImmortalityJapanMortalityForgettingAnthropologyFinitudeDigital ImmortalityDigital AnthropologyQuadrillions
Book:Inheritance from Mother
Create image

“Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up. We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist. But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are. There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind.”

LifeTimeStrengthFutureForgettingGive UpBehind
Author:Brigid Gorry-Hines
Create image