Quotes about forgetting

In two days the colonel had been buried, and in three days forgotten.

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

To forget — this is the desire of all people, and when they encounter something unpleasant, they always say: If only I could forget! But to forget is an art that must be practiced in advance. To be able to forget always depends upon how one experiences actuality.

It will take years for us to recover from what we've lived through. And also to forget. I tell myself that life is incomprehensible. We need death to bring us back together. (VI)

Things changed, he thought. Then they didn’t. And we forgot they could again.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

"There are inevitably more than enough words. You record them in your marvelous memory even now. And someday, my journals will be discovered - more words. I warn you that you read my words at your peril. The wordless movement of terrible events lies just below their surface. Be deaf! You do not need to hear or, hearing, you do not need to remember. How soothing it is to forget. And how dangerous!"

In truth, is it better to remember or to forget? We must balance this decision between our history and our humanity.

"This is a bad land for gods," said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn't Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. "You've probably all learned that. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you've been forgotten, or you're scared you're going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you're just getting tired of existing on the whim of people."

“These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us.”

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.