76 Quotes About Forgetting

Sometimes we forget the important things in life, and it’s hard to remember them all at once. For instance, you might have a lot of things on your mind, so you don’t have time to think about what you said to someone who is no longer around. We all forget things sometimes, but it can be frustrating when we realize we’ve forgotten something important. These quotes about forgetting will help remind you that there are some things that you can’t forget.

1
If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him. Paulo Coelho
2
Well, now If little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you Little by little If suddenly you forget me Do not look for me For I shall already have forgotten you If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots Remember That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms And my roots will set off to seek another land . Pablo Neruda
3
Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. Haruki Murakami
Do not allow me to forget you
4
Do not allow me to forget you Unknown
5
If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate. C. Joybell C.
You will find that it is necessary to let things...
6
You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles. C. Joybell C.
Maybe if I forgot things once in a while, we'd...
7
Maybe if I forgot things once in a while, we'd all be a little bit happier. Jay Asher
8
A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on; And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly. That’s human action on the outside world. We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget; And the sun is always punctual every day.(5/7/14) Alberto Caeiro
Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes...
9
Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again. Maggie Nelson
I don’t want to beone of those easily forgotten people,...
10
I don’t want to beone of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, soinfluential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distantmemory. Cecelia Ahern
11
We are all changed by this war, Soph. Daniel is your brother now that Rachel is. .. gone. Truly your brother. And this baby, he or she is innocent of. .. his or her creation.'' It's hard to forget, ' she said quietly. 'And I'll never forgive.'' But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.' Sophie sighed. 'I suppose, ' she said, sounding too adult for a girl of he Kristin Hannah
12
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008) Unknown
13
The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less. Unknown
14
It's painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget. Christina Baker Kline
15
And what part of me will begin To forget you first; the sudden Pains that shoot to my bruised palms As I think of you in the cover of the dark, Or the invisible hand Clutching at my heart, as it knocks against its savage cage, Or my still swollen lips As they remember the touch of your gentle fingertips? Sreesha Divakaran
16
There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless. I know not what we have been; I know not what we are; but I know what we might be. And so I light out for the unknown regions. M.T. Anderson
17
When you don't grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, "Okay, " and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. that's what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice. Anna Smaill
18
I was delighted to see you again, and forgot for the moment that all happiness is fleeting. Alexandre Dumas
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Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all. Friedrich Nietzsche
20
MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget. V E R S H I N I N. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence. Anton Chekhov
21
Always we learn things and then we forget them. Dave Eggers
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They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Unknown
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What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget? Jodi Picoult
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To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. Joyce Cary
25
We deliberately forget because forgetting is a blessing. On both an emotional level and a spiritual level, forgetting is a natural part of the human experience and a natural function of the human brain. It is a feature, not a bug, one that saves us from being owned by our memories. Can a world that never forgets be a world that truly forgives? Tim Challies
26
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's. Christopher Hitchens
27
If you can't forgive and forget, then pick one and do it ... Jim Brault
28
I was starting to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place. It was the magic of forgetting. Francesca Lia Block
29
How long would it take for her sadness to ease? How long must she wait to forget a man who would've been her ideal, were he not who he was? The answer: too long. But wait she must. Miranda Davis
30
People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living. Stephen Carpenter
31
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream. Marcel Proust
32
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? .. And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. Walter Benjamin
33
Nothing stays forgotten for long, Elly. Sometimes we simply have to remind the world that we're still here. Sarah Winman
34
So one can lose a good ideaby not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asidesit knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiationsare terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and doesrecognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier. John Ashbery
35
How much of this day have you already forgotten? Marty Rubin
36
To remember is to rewrite. To photograph is to replace. The only reliable memories, I suppose, are the ones that have been forgotten. They are the dark rooms of the mind. Unopened, untouched, and uncorrupted. Abby Geni
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Memory is the enemy of wonder Michael Pollan
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The more she tried to forget, the more she remembered. T.K. Kiser
39
We want so badly to be happy — to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live — that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were. Dathan Auerbach
40
The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything. Milan Kundera
41
There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death. Richard Holmes
42
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. Cees Nooteboom
43
Forgiveness is an attribute we must practice , as we all want the Al-mighty to forgive us. But forgetting and trusting again with a revivifying attitude is undoubtedly stark exhausting . We have a wonderful memory like a nostalgic alarm which hurdles us in bandaging the heart and mind just like a new one. AISHA RAHEEL
44
One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy. Friedrich Nietzsche
45
That's just the way it is. I'll always remember. She's forgotten. Unknown
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Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting Lauren Beukes
47
At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life. Milan Kundera
48
There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes. Arundhati Roy
49
Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? Haruki Murakami
50
We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful. Unknown
51
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? . Tan Twan Eng
52
Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life. Iginio Ugo Tarchetti
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There's a lot of magic between you too, ain't no denying that. And magic makes forgettin' hard. Nicholas Sparks
54
That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well. Walter Mosley
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While he spends all of his time trying to remember, I spend all of my time trying to forget. I don’t want to remember how it feels to love him. I want to forget everything in this world that reminds me of him. Colleen Hoover
56
You can forget the past, but something should be left in your mine to not forget yourself. Ali Rezavand Zayeri
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... though the names of lovers are forgotten in time, their nameswritten across the sky as ogham threads are tracedbetween the stars John Daniel Thieme
58
We stood side by side, and for that minute, in the stillness of that room, he was not the King. I was not not the Princess, taken against her will to the City. We were two people trying to forget. Anna Carey
59
My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams. Stephen King
60
Memories: some can be sucker punching, others carry you forward; some stay with you forever, others you forget on your own. You can’t really know which ones you’ll survive if you don’t stay on the battlefield, bad times shooting at you like bullets. But if you’re lucky, you’ll have plenty of good times to shield you. Adam Silvera
61
Memories are never as true as the things one forgets. Marty Rubin
62
How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that is the truth. Diane Setterfield
63
There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her. Jorge Luis Borges
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Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. Audrey Niffenegger
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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting... William Wordsworth
66
That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. Unknown
67
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. Andrew M. Greeley
68
But God has also given us the power to forget, so that when the tragedy is over we carry on as normal. Malala Yousafzai
69
During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simply had trouble calling up certain words or would say similar words instead and then immediately laugh at himself. In the end he had only a handful of words left, and all his attempts at saying anything more substantial resulted in one of the last sentences he could articulate: 'That's strange.' Whenever he said 'That's strange, ' his eyes would express an infinite astonishment at knowing everything and being able to say nothing. Things lost their names and merged into a single, undifferentiated reality. I was the only one who by talking to him could temporarily transform that nameless infinity into the world of clearly named entities. Milan Kundera
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Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting. Brian Tracy
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Everyone plays a purpose, even fathers who lie to you or leave you behind. Time takes care of all that pain so if someone derails you, it'll be okay eventually. Adam Silvera
72
The inside jokes have already dissolved into unordered words with no punchline. The gifts have been reduced to objects whose saving grace is their monetary value, no meaning and all function. There are photographs, somewhere, but I’m not the person posed in them anymore and whoever that is sitting next to me, all dressed up in your costume and wearing your mask, well, that’s not you either. Stephanie Georgopulos
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You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time. Dan OBrien
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In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten. Agatha Christie
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To forget would mean the things we never knew had never waited to be known, never waitedto be forgotten, had never been; waitingbeneath the long dead starsin time.. . John Daniel Thieme