340 Quotes About Forgetting

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

The Hardest PartNot the loving, but the part just after—the rememberingwhen you gathered the broken pieces of what once had been whole and the part after that—the forgettingwhen you drowned those piecesone by one into abyss.

This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.

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.

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing.And nothing can be nice.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

Sometimes forgetting is the only thing that gets you through this life.

Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary.

[M]y terror of forgetting is greater than my terror of having too much to remember. Let the accumulated facts about the past continue to multiply. ... So that those who need can find that this person did live, those events really took place, this interpretation is not the only one.