Quotes & Sayings About Forgetting What Happened

What have we done?" Lizzie whispered.
He had no acceptable answer for that, other than that it had been stunning.
She suddenly propped her chin on his chest and looked up at him with eyes still warm with the glow of lovemaking. "I think I've lost my fool mind, aye?"
"If you have, it has gone the way of mine," he said, stroking her cheek.
"What are we to do now? Go on as if nothing has happened between us?"
"Go on," he said, aware of how incredibly alive he was feeling, how impossibly tender his heart. "But without forgetting this moment." He really had no idea what he was saying. He could not look in her blue eyes and recall them in the throes of passion and imagine walking away from them. — Julia London

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us. — David Brin

IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding. — Laurie Halse Anderson

you are snakeskin
and i keep shedding you somehow
my mind is forgetting
every exquisite detail
of your face
the letting go has
become the forgetting
which is the most
pleasant and the saddest thing
to have happened — Rupi Kaur

Forgetting doesn't mean it never happened; it means not dealing with the consequences. — Laura Thalassa

When you have a hard day or when I see you slipping backward, I'm desperate to stop it, to make you see how amazing you are, to help you know that you have so much to look forward to. The things that happened to you won't haunt you forever."
"But I'll remember them forever." I know there's no forgetting and I'm still not sure what to do with that.
He sucks in a breath. "But they'll hurt less."
I don't have to look at him to know there are tears on his face. — Jolene Perry

During the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Eastern Massachusetts, mid-nineteenth century, there happened to be a very lively press run by working people, young women in the factories, artisans in the mills, and so on. They had their own press that was very interesting, very widely read and had a lot of support. And they bitterly condemned the way the industrial system was taking away their freedom and liberty and imposing on them rigid hierarchical structures that they didn't want. One of their main complaints was what they called "the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but self." For 150 years there have been massive efforts to try to impose "the new spirit of the age" on people. But it's so inhuman that there's a lot of resistance, and it continues. — Noam Chomsky

All of those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened. A thing happened, and now it will never un happen. Here it is in a photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A plane crash. A comet smeared across a morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a cafe table on the Champs-Elysees on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon's pale face under the brim of a fisherman's cap. all these things happened, and my father committed them to a memory that wasn't just his own, but the world's. My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. — Helen Macdonald

People like music when they're in love, but they don't need it as much. You need music when you're missing someone or you're pining for someone or you're forgetting someone or you're trying to process what just happened. — Taylor Swift

On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.
This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful. — Arthur Schopenhauer

What really amazed me was when I sent a suit out for cleaning, forgetting that $700 was in the pocket. They sent the suit back to me. If that happened in New York, both money and suit would be gone. — Mike Tyson

Because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far. — Peter S. Beagle

the letting go has
become the forgetting
which is the most
pleasant and saddest thing
to have happened — Rupi Kaur

Cristofer did not write because he feared forgetting something. He never forgot anything, even when he reached old age. For Cristofer, the written word seemed to regulate the world. Stop its fluctuations. Prevent notions from eroding. This is why Cristofer's sphere of interest was so broad. According to the writer's thinking, that sphere should correspond to the world's breadth.

Cristofer usually left his writings in the places where he had made them: on the bench, on the stove, on the woodpile. He did not pick them up when the fell to the floor: he vaguely anticipated their discovery, much later, in a cultural stratum. Cristofer understood that the written word would always remain that way. No matter what happened later, once it had been written, the word had already occurred. — Evgenij Vodolazkin

There's an old poem by Neruda that I've always been captivated by, and one of the lines in it has stuck with me ever since the first time I read it. It says "love is so short, forgetting is so long." It's a line I've related to in my saddest moments, when I needed to know someone else had felt that exact same way. And when we're trying to move on, the moments we always go back to aren't the mundane ones. They are the moments you saw sparks that weren't really there, felt stars aligning without having any proof, saw your future before it happened, and then saw it slip away without any warning. — Taylor Swift

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN Trauma and Recovery — Jon Krakauer

Once we have forgiven, however, we get a new freedom to forget. This time forgetting is a sign of health; it is not a trick to avoid spiritual surgery. We can forget because we have been healed. But even if it is easier to forget after we forgive, we should not make forgetting a test of our forgiving. The test of forgiving lies with healing the lingering pain of the past, not with forgetting the past has ever happened. — Lewis B. Smedes

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before.
He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away.
(p.205) — Michael Zadoorian

I came to the party with the sole purpose of getting completely shit-faced, to be perfectly honest. That was it, that was The Plan from the very beginning. I wanted more than anything that ever regrettable, forgetting-everything-you-learned-as-a-toddler kind of wasted that only either the completely stupid venture into or the complete novice (given how naive I was I think I fall more into the latter category). It was a very simple plan, but I like to think the simplest ones tend to be the most effective. The Plan sure as hell didn't involve everything else that happened that night, as all of that occurred quite naturally on its own. — J.C. Joranco

Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering
remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you dont want to repeat what happened. — Desmond Tutu