Quotes & Sayings About Amnesia

First, my people must be taught the knowledge of self. Then and only then will they be able to under-stand others and that which surrounds them. Anyone who does not have a knowledge of self is considered a victim of either amnesia or unconsciousness and is not very competent. The lack of knowledge of self is a prevailing condition among my people here in America. Gaining the knowledge of self makes us unite into a great unity. Knowledge of self makes you take on the great virtue of learning. — Elijah Muhammad

There are so few who 'walk the talk'..
No wonder the World is plagued with 'Talk Obesity' and 'Walk Anorexia'..
Walk the Talk Amnesia? — Abha Maryada Banerjee

Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. — David Rakoff

In "securing" people, make them really really afraid. Create all kinds of colors and alerts that terrorize the population. Terror and numbness will eventually be mistaken for security. In "securing" people, take away their opinions and voices and instincts. Make them feel afraid to speak out. Control will eventually be mistaken for security. In "securing" people, distract them through addictive consumption and mindless entertainment programming. Amnesia will eventually be mistaken for security. — Eve Ensler

Only medical hypnosis is capable of opening up amnesia. — Betty Hill

When people ask about relationships, they always say, "How did you guys meet?" Not, "OMG, tell me about your third year! And when a relationship is in trouble, the desperate couple is always trying to recapture the magic of when they first met. The real tragedy is that, without time travel or amnesia, it's impossible to ever get back there. Which is why to most people, marriage is about as magical as watching David Copperfield make Claudia Schiffer disappear. — Shane Kuhn

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. — Robert Macfarlane

It doesn't matter if I get my memories back or not," Simon said. "It doesn't matter if another demon gives me amnesia tomorrow. I know you: You'll come find me again, you'll come rescue me no matter what happens. You'll come for me, and I'll discover you all over again. I love you. I love you without the memories. I love you right now."
Isabelle said in a calm voice: "I know."
Simon stared at her. "Was that ... ," he said slowly. "Was that a Star Wars reference? Because if it was, I would like to declare my love all over again."
"Go on, then," said Isabelle. "I mean it. Say it again. I've been waiting awhile."
"I love you," said Simon. — Cassandra Clare

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia - that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives - and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. — Sigmund Freud

[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition. — Tom Holland

The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are. — Anthony Marra

There seems to be a hole in the culture where mothers went. Then, when their kids went off to school or stopped having ear infections every three weeks, they emerged from the mother zone, and like everyone else, they forgot where they'd been. Amnesia surrounding motherhood is the rule, not the exception. — Marni Jackson

I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions. — Graham Hancock

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is. — Robert Smithson

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead. — Noam Chomsky

For now, I'll let you please temporary amnesia," he said and lifted my chin to him. "But I'm never going to forget what it felt like when you were biting my lip instead of your own." -Trey to Monica, The Only Exception — Magan Vernon

That will only happen if I have a bout of amnesia or if I feel like mooning someone in the audience. — Daryl Hannah

Sin is nothing more than a most extreme form of amnesia. It is forgetting who were when we were created as a spirit that came forth from the heart of God the Father - as a spirit made in His sinless image. — Praying Medic

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves. — Lynda Barry

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. — James Hillman

I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past. — Patrick Modiano

Forgotten Front." Much of the amnesia was caused by Italians who'd — Mark T. Sullivan

This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black
witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation. — Ambrose Bierce

A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes ... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets.
"Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now. — P.C. Hodgell

America has amnesia ... Certainly, there is a passion for memory loss in American thought ... Americans may be the world champion forgetters. — Paula Gunn Allen

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do. — Jane Hirshfield

Matthews asked:
"How intimate was your relationship with Dr. Miller?"
"Intimate?" Phil still couldn't grasp what they were asking.
"My colleague is asking if you'd ever had sex with Dr. Miller before that evening." Jones added curtly.
"I've never ... We've never ... We're friends. We'd never had sex before that evening, and we didn't have sex that evening either."
"How do you explain your semen in her sheets then, Mr. Marshall? — Olga Nunez Miret

Politicians and figureheads bank on the amnesia of the ignorant. — Darnell Lamont Walker

But revenge is hollow. I'd prefer amnesia. — Tera Lynn Childs

It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored. — Moheb Costandi

I was increasingly both horrified and sceptical about these memories - I had no recall of these things at all, though I couldn't imagine why I'd want to make it all up either. It felt as though it had all happened to somebody else, I was not there - it wasn't me - when those people did nasty things.
But then, of course, it didn't feel like me, that's the whole point of dissociation - to create distance between the victim and her experience of the abuse. The alters were created for just that purpose: so that I'd not be aware that it happened to me, but rather to "others". The trouble is, in reality it was my body that took the abuse. It was only my mind that was divided, and sooner or later the amnesic barriers were bound to come down.
And that's exactly what had begun to happen as I heard their stories. They triggered a vague and growing sense in me that this really is my story. — Carolyn Bramhall

The longer the bull market lasts the more severely investors will be affected with amnesia; after five years or so, many people no longer believe that bear markets are possible. — Benjamin Graham

So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew. Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then you changed your mind. Don't imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess.
Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.
Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead. — Maggie Stiefvater

... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again. — Jeremy Paxman

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And - since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form - the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light. — Donna Tartt

You have to have like a bit of amnesia both on the winning side and the losing side of this thing ... On the losing side you need to be able to forget a loss to be able to move on and to be successful in your next fight. But on the winning side you need to be able to forget a win so you don't get stuck in this pattern of like, "I'm unstoppable". So there has to be a level of amnesia for a fighter. — Rich Franklin

So I devised a way for you to create anew, and Know, Who You Are in your experience. I did this by providing you with: 1. Relativity - a system wherein you could exist as a thing in relationship to something else. 2. Forgetfulness - a process by which you willingly submit to total amnesia, so that you can not know that relativity is merely a trick, and that you are All of It. 3. Consciousness - a state of Being in which you grow until you reach full awareness, then becoming a True and Living God, creating and experiencing your own reality, expanding and exploring that reality, changing and re-creating that reality as you stretch your consciousness to new limits - or shall we say, to no limit. — Neale Donald Walsch

A laboratory analogy to repression can be found in an experiment by A.F. Zeller.
Zeller arranged a situation so that one group of students underwent an unhappy "failure" experience right after they had successfully learned a list of nonsense syllables. When tested later, these subjects showed much poorer recall of the nonsense syllables compared to a control group, who had not experienced failure. When this same "failure" group was later allowed to succeed on the same task that they had earlier failed, their recall showed tremendous improvement. This experiment indicates that when the reason for the repression is removed, when material to be remembered is no longer associated with negative effects, a person no longer experiences retrieval failure. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation" - so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture. — James Gleick

Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion. — Chris Hedges

I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on. — Tom Hayden

We're building an independent political program that can run electoral politics and then turn on a dime to hold our leaders to task, in case they suddenly develop that old case of amnesia! We'll be there to remind them what they promised and who they promised to work for! — Richard Trumka

I guess its time you officially met the lost boys," I said to Daniel.
"Lost boys? You mean like that old Kiefer Sutherland movie?
"What? No, I mean like Peter Pan and the lost boys."
"Is she calling us fairies?" Asked Slade.
"No," Brent said. "She means the lost boys that never wanted to grow up, and got into mischief with Peter Pan."
"Still sounds like fairies to me." Slade crossed his tattooed arms in front of his chest.
"Still sounds like that Kiefer Sutherland movie to me." Daniel smirked.
"We were in the play together, like, seven years ago. You were mad because my mom made you wear tights, but you wanted to be a pirate."
Daniel held his hand up. "Partial amnesia here, remember? I must have blocked out any and all recollections associations with said tights."
Brent, Zach, and Ryan laughed. Slade almost cracked a smile.


~ Grace, Daniel, and The Lost Boys — Bree Despain

None of my issues have included memory loss or unconscious actions," she said.
Thomas squinted back at her. "If they had, how would you know it?"
Molly frowned. "Valid point. — Jim Butcher

A child who is being abused on an ongoing basis needs to be able to function despite the trauma that dominates his or her daily life. That becomes the job of at least one ANP [alternate personality], whom the child creates to be unaware of the abuse and also of the multiplicity, and to "pass as normal" in the real world. The ANP is just an alter specialized for handling the adult world - in other words, the "front person" for the system. — Alison Miller

You said he was a perfectly adequate lover."

"Perfectly adequate? I dont suppose I ever said that about you?" She only had to look and Logan and those rough hands to know he'd be a thoroughly, mind-blowingly, head-bangingly, DIRTY lover."

"I bloody hope not. — Amy Andrews

How could they have forgotten the importance of today's date? My brain screamed at me as, with shaking fingers, I climbed the stairs to the bus, before making my way to the back, out of sight. My birthday, like the norm, happens on the same date every year. Therefore, the confused part of my brain argued, how could they have all simply forgotten this fact and acted so "normal" when I entered the kitchen this morning?
They may have been abducted by aliens in the night? This was a voice from the incomprehensible area of my mind. Consequently, their behaviour would make complete sense then!
Furthermore, answered another voice from the same ridiculous compartment, they could've simply gone to bed last night fine and then awoken the next morning with amnesia? Sometimes, these things happen unexpectedly. Adele Rose, Awakening. — Adele Rose

Today's coastal development along with hurricane amnesia places modern man on a collision course with catastrophe if the lessons of history are ignored. — Max Mayfield

Remain Healthy All Day: Drink a spoonful of oil every morning. Reach up with your arms and extend your body to its full height. Use a warm towel to dry the cat. Consider a philosophical idea larger than your area of expertise. Avoid getting cancer. Chalk up bad decisions to outside influences. Don't take your father too seriously. Play a game where you close your eyes very tightly, and when you open your eyes, you have amnesia and you must draw the details of your life from your surroundings. Give up smoking, drinking, and poetic verse. Remind yourself how important you are to your friends or at least your animals. Wax the floor in socks. Enter into a healthy, monogamous relationship. Consider briefly the idea of a soulmate. Light an entire box of matches and throw it into the sink. Hold a metal rod to the heavens and beg for whatever comes next. — Amelia Gray

The overall commentary on what I'm doing is saying, 'Hey look! I get to create whatever persona I want to, and it's all up to me. And the truth is, we are all - basically the universe - pretending to be humans for a brief moment of time. With a little self-induced amnesia. — RuPaul

Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia. — Walter Brueggemann

Well! I feel happy these days. I've started taking a herbal anti-depressant. It's called Saint John's Wort. Apparently it's the best-selling anti-depressant in many places. It's the most popular anti-depressant in Germany ... After, I'm guessing, amnesia ... — Emo Philips

What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip - even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged. — Timothy B. Tyson

We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia. — Philip K. Dick

Very few people run around and get amnesia and have comas and come out of them and do all the silly of people have strokes and have comas and come out of them and do all the silly things we do on soaps. — Erika Slezak

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything. — Charles Stross

Amnesia was a soldier's best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do. — Alex London

Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fragment of an idea of a memory, or something his mind, desperate for connections, has created on its own. — Doug Dorst

... if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin. — Sam Harris

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia. — Thomas Merton

Sin is really an extreme form of amnesia. It is forgetting who you were when you were created as a spirit which came forth from the heart of God - a spirit made in His perfect, sinless image. — Praying Medic

Leo laughed. "I keep forgetting about your amnesia. Heh. Forgetting about amnesia. That's funny. But yeah, her dad's Tristan McLean." "Uh - Sorry, what was he in?" "It doesn't matter," Piper said quickly. — Rick Riordan

Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive. — Louis Garrel

I don't even want to think about all those dishes," Donny said. "Hey, now that I believe in demons and magic spells, who's going to tell me about little dish elves that come and clean your kitchen while you nap?"
"There is a class of fairy called Nibs that will do it. But they come with their own set of issues. It's never worth the hassle of summoning them," Varnie answered.
"I was totally kidding, but..." Donny eyed him suspiciously. "Wait, are you punking me? There really is no such thing as Nibs, is there?"
Varnie smiled noncommitally.
"Ame, is there sucha thing as Nibs?"
Amelia bit her lip to keep from laughing. "I've never heard of them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist."
"Amnesia boy?"
I held up my hand. "Yeah, sorry. Amnesia."
"You guys suck." She pouted. — Gwen Hayes

It's like he has emotional amnesia ... I think you have to accept that the person you knew isn't there at the moment. I was witness to how much he loved you. I have the photos. This isn't the person we knew. I don't recognize this person. He's shed his skin. Her heart is broken too. She has to say the thing that will give me back my life. She draws on every reserve. I see how much it hurts her and it hurts me too. I came from her joy and her pain, I lived in it and I live in it now. — Emma Forrest

Simon Lewis, are you forgetting that you were a mundane when I started dating you? A rather scrawny mundane with terrible fashion sense, I should point out. And then you were a vampire, and I still dated you. Then you were a mundane again, but this time with freaking amnesia. And still, inexplicably, I fell in love with you all over again. What could possibly make you think I have any standards left when it comes to you?"
"Uh, thank you, I think?"
"'Thank you' is the correct response. And also 'I love you, too, Isabelle — Cassandra Clare

Jews, Germans, and Allies is an important historical document, especially in light of those revisionists who would impose a universal amnesia about the suffering and losses incurred during the Holocaust. The grim statistics that Ms. Grossmann presents in her carefully researched and well-organized book carry evidence of the terrible truth. But the testimony of the survivors she quotes contains the final, ineradicable facts of history. — Hilma Wolitzer

15 minutes will open up the amnesia and you'll have full recall. — Betty Hill

Aye, Captain. I have a good memory. Except for the amnesia. — Elaine Corvidae

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. — David McCullough

Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it. — Chris Hedges

We say, "It wasn't that bad. It was all my fault. I'm making all this stuff up. "
All my life, I spoke bitterly of my mother's treatment of me as a child.
Friends asked, "What did she do to you?" I couldn't really describe it, and in frustration would say, "Well, she didn't lock us up in closets." in fact, my mother behaved much worse than that, but by focusing on the empty closet, I avoided looking at what waited beyond it. — Sarah E. Olson

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn't fashionable these days, but it's her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. — Margaret Drabble

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too? — Laurie Halse Anderson

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws
riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public
knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.
ROS: And talking to himself.
GUIL: And talking to himself. — Tom Stoppard

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. — Michael Crichton

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — Susan Sontag

Heartbreak is its own form of amnesia. — Lauren Kate

My head is killing me, my throat is killing me, my stomach bubbles with toxic waste. I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid if this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It was him against the flames and he revelled in it.
Logan was good at his job. Exceptionally good. He had the Knight gift for it.
There was no fear of the fire that would turn most mortals to jelly because flames licked in his blood.
To him it was a battle - good against evil.

And he was the good guy. — Amy Andrews

Love finds you in the strangest places, and hope clings to us in the nooks and crannies we never think to look. — Shelly Crane

People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me. — Ann Patchett

The great thing about baseball is when you're done, you'll only tell your grandchildren the good things. If they ask me about 1989, I'll tell them I had amnesia. — Sparky Anderson

He found her utterly fascinating, a nameless, homeless, naked vampire, sleeping away the day in his bed, wanted by state and federal police. — Travis Luedke

Memory repression thrives in shame, secrecy, and shock. The shame and degradation experienced during sexual assault is profound, especially for children who have no concept of what is happening to them or why. Sexual abuse is so bizarre and horrible that the frightened child feels compelled to bury the event deep inside his or her mind. — Renee Fredrickson

Sometimes it seems that half of the fairy tales of the world are some form of Cinderella, ugly duckling, or poor boy story, telling of the little person who has no power or possessions who ends up being king or queen, prince or princess. We write it off as wishful dreaming, when it is actually the foundational pattern of disguise or amnesia, loss, and recovery. Every Beauty is sleeping, it seems, before it can meet its Prince. The duckling must be "ugly," or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection. It is written in our hardwiring, but can only be heard at the soul level. It will usually be resisted and opposed at the ego level. — Richard Rohr

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them. — Donna Tartt

I wish I had amnesia so I could forget what you look like. — Lucy Christopher

We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about - survival and growth. — Audre Lorde

I can't seem to recall if I've ever had amnesia before. — Stewart Lee Beck

It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones. — A.C. Grayling

And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation. — Patrick Modiano

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical - in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. — Wendell Berry

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia. — Angela Davis

Sometimes people who want to understand Haiti from a political perspective may be missing part of the picture. They also need to look at Haiti from a psychological perspective. Most of the elite suffer from psychogenic amnesia. That means it's not organic amnesia, such as damage caused by brain injury. It's just a matter of psychology. — Jean-Bertrand Aristide

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. — Alice Miller

Amnesia of both past failure and success is the best way forward. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots. — P. J. O'Rourke

Not knowing who you are is a certain kind of hell. — Kelly Thompson