Self Erasure Quotes & Sayings

When I was on unemployment I was not ashamed of being a social outcast. Just furious. It's the same thing for being a woman: I am not remotely ashamed of not being a hot sexy number but I am livid that - as a girl who doesn't attract men - I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn't even be around. — Virginie Despentes

I felt it was really, really important, not just in the vein of feminist erasure or whatever but also just as an artist that I honored my work. — Kathleen Hanna

She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasure and perfected selections. — Cristina Garcia

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs. — William Styron

When J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord's entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord's effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: "The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one's life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. — Timothy J. Keller

There is no such thing as a natural fit between form and content. Seamless elegance would be tantamount to erasure. — Stacey D'Erasmo

Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future. — Daniel Libeskind

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend. — Claudia Rankine

Well, my boyfriend's from California so it's kind of a bit of California countryside but closer to home. It just takes a couple of hours to get there. I don't know, it's just very laid back, nobody knows who we are really. We've just got our friends there who are kind of outside Erasure and everything. It's just very nice — Andy Bell

Outlets for the freed blacks are alone wanted for the erasure of the blot from our Republican character. — James Madison

Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about the past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act you are complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you're now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice. — Ken Liu

Hand cannot erase this love — Steven Wilson

Having lived my entire life in the wake of Forsyth's racial cleansing. I wanted to begin reversing its communal act of erasure by learning as much as I could about the lost people and places of black Forsyth. I was determined to document more than just that the expulsions occurred: I wanted to know where, when, how, and to whom.

It was then I set myself the task of finding out what really happened - not because the truth is an adequate remedy for the past, and not because it can undo what was done. Instead, I wanted to honor the dead by leaving a fuller account of what they endured and all that they and their descendants lost. — Patrick Phillips

Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?"
"The what?"
"The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you."
"Don't know what you're talking about, dear girl. — Jasper Fforde

The death of their two children isn't the erasure of two beings. It is the loss of God and the skies, it is the loss of the past and the future, of all their small-voiced words and their hearts. — A.S. Patric

Again Serena's frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background. "Aren't you the one that screwed me over last time here?" she asks umpire Asderaki. "Yeah, you are. Don't look at me. Really, don't even look at me. Don't look my way. Don't look my way," she repeats, because it is that simple. — Claudia Rankine

All data leaves a trail. The search for data leaves a trail. The erasure of data leaves a trail. The absence of data, under the right circumstances, can leave the clearest trail of all. — C.S. Friedman

To be yourself is in many ways to be inconvenient to others. Only placaters and appeasers get along with other people all the time and that's not really getting along with anyone. That's just self erasure. — Stefan Molyneux

I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us. — Tim O'Brien

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out. — Matthea Harvey

Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings. — Cherrie L. Moraga

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why - I couldn't put my finger on it. — Bret Easton Ellis

My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood. — Natasha Trethewey

The brain was the single thing that remained sacred among the Psy. To rewire that would equal the erasure of the individual, making the PsyNet a true hive mind. — Nalini Singh

Anything Vince Clarke, whether it's Erasure, Yaz, or Depeche Mode. It's basically R&B with synths. It's very sexy music and perfect for gay sex. — Margaret Cho

Socialism , whether it's the 'soft tyranny' of the EuroAmerican management state or the murderously repressive forms taken by Hitler , Stalin , Mao , or Pol Pot, is all about disindividuation , a steady, relentless erasure of the individual differences among us, everything that makes us who we are. 'Everybody in, nobody out!' is the marching mantra of militant collectivized medicine, but it accurately describes all other aspects of collectivism , as well. No alternatives allowed, no choices, no individualism , no individuality , and ultimately, no individuation . — L. Neil Smith

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it]. — Dori Laub

I've always felt that poetry is the enemy of silence, but of course, in the right moments, silence can be useful. The trick is just trying to figure out when. And when I say silence, I suppose I actually meant erasure - poetry is a force against that, I think, or it should be. — Cornelius Eady

That erasure was the gift I gave myself. — Alissa Nutting

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure. — Natasha Trethewey

If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare ... we should be able to show why ... his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we ... call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein ... without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple. — William James

It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure. — David Foster Wallace

You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are? — Lauren Beukes

There is no going back. There is no revival of our humans. There is no erasure of our horrors. No healing except of time and she is a vengeful mistress, leaving scars that are forever. But there also is no proof of foreknowledge, only of twenty-twenty hindsight. You guessed. You did not know. Knowing is only for God. — Faith Hunter

As soon as people hear my voice and synthesizer together they hear Erasure. — Andy Bell

Missouri would have convinced you that we did not exist if it were not for social media. The intensity with which they responded to protestors very early - we were able to document that and share it quickly with people in a way that we never could have without social media. We were able to tell our own stories. The history of blackness is also a history of erasure. Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional. So what was powerful in the context of Ferguson is that there were many people able to tell their story as the story unfolded. — Anonymous

Doomsday, when it came, wouldn't be a physical phenomenon; it would be an
all-inclusive erasure of simulectronic circuits. — Daniel F. Galouye

The first week I was here, a girl got canned for humming an Erasure song while she was churning butter. It's like, yeah, Erasure is historic, but not historic enough. — Chuck Palahniuk