Quotes About Forgetting To Do Something

“The worm hissed. "You said it couldn't see!" shouted Oates, forgetting Umber's instruction to be silent. He shook a fist. "We all heard it, Umber! You specifically said, it couldn't see!"
"I know-isn't it wonderful to learn something new?" Umber laughed.”

— P.W. Catanese

“Of course he knew what kinds of thoughts these were: the not-always-true ones, conveniently forgetting the other times, when he and Christine had bickered at the smallest thing, aggravated by the other's mere constant presence, and sometimes even said awful things
irreversible and stinging
that lingered like a foul odor for a long time afterward. Then there were long stretches of calm. And yet the bickering, the irritation, that too was part of the delicate glue that kept them together, still feeling something, even when they grew, sometimes for long periods, bored with each other, tired of each other, before settling back into their more usual, tamed and tamped down but still real and extant love.”

— Daphne Kalotay

“We've all experienced pondering a problem all day long only to find we receive the solution when forgetting about the problem and thinking of something else. When we stop concentrating so hard, we allow our subconscious to flourish, and those who do this more than others are often called geniuses.”

— James Morcan

“We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.
It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.”

— Mark Nepo

“Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.”

— Sara Zarr

“But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.”

— Krzysztof Kielowski

“My cat is always looking at me like i am forgetting something crucial and he depends on it”

— Megan Boyle

“Oh, I know. He cares about controlling you, using you, and what else am I forgetting? Oh yeah, claiming you. You're an object to him, something to be won.”

— H.M. Ward

“Hey, aren't we forgetting something? (Savitar)
Your dignity? (Takeshi)
No, you have me confused with you again. Aren't you supposed to be training him? (Savitar)
So you admit my superiority by deflecting my attention to the neophyte. (Takeshi)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“The difference between forgetting something and not remembering it is big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through.)”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

“What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation - I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework.”

— Lionel Shriver

“However, there is something worse than idealizing the past-or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.”

— Tony Judt

“Existentialism and psychoanalysis, without forgetting socialism, are mainly what killed basic intelligence in the West. When someone affirms that two plus two equals four, his pulse is taken, and he is asked what social milieu he comes from. Logic is replaced by relativistic psychology, which is in fact false at its root, and then by a so-called sociology. People claim there is no truth, and they assert this as true; they say that man can know nothing, but this is something they think they know; they claim that "life" takes precedence over thought, and yet this is something they think! People are so stupid they do not notice these contradictions.
Extract from a letter from Frithjof Schuon of 13 April 1974.”

— Frithjof Schuon

“Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favorite song that you knew by heart. It's like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a television show you watched for years. It's something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there's an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can't rest until I know the answers.”

— Cecelia Ahern

“Distractions ... that's what makes up a big part of our lives, y'know? The distractions. Lots of times, we're like moths fluttering around a porch light. Bugs'll swarm around that bult, all distracted, forgetting in their minuscule insect brains that there's something else they should be doing, like biting people or making more bugs. We're like that, although our brains are generally larger ... Human distractions are bigger, better lightbulbs. We got TVs and computers. We got blinking casino lights and live bands on cruise ships playing yet another version of 'Hot, Hot, Hot' until you wanna puke, but in the end, they're all just porch light. So we go from one bright bulb to another until we hit the bug zapper, and it's all over.”

— Neal Shusterman

“Mourning is not forgetting ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.”

— Margery Allingham

“Why don't you ever say anything unless you're answering a question?"
"Just a habit, I guess. I'm always forgetting to say important things."
"Can I give you some advice?"
"Go ahead."
"If you don't fix that, it'll end up costing you."
"You're probably right. Still, it's like a junky car. If I fix one thing, it'll be easier to notice something else that's broken.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.”

— Jill Lepore

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”

— Jane Austen

“Here I am ... wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end
that there is such a thing as death.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.”

— José Saramago

“Now don't run away." "I'm not. I learned to see beyond the soles of these shoes. I learned that behind this wretched life we lead there is a great ideal, a great hope. I learned that each individual life should be guided by that hope and by that ideal. And people who don't feel that must have died before they were born." He smiled and added, "Those aren't my words. It's something I heard someone else say years ago." "In your view ,then, I belong to the group who died before they were born?" "No, you belong to another group, the ones who haven't yet been born." "Aren't you forgetting about all my experience of life?" "Not at all, but experience is only worth anything when it's useful to other people, and you're not useful to anyone.”

— José Saramago

“He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment's reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art.”

— Edward St. Aubyn

“I have been forgetting things for years - at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.”

— Nora Ephron

“I used to teach kids when I was younger. When I was about 14 or 15 I started teaching children drama and something that I used to say to them was, 'Don't be afraid.' People would be afraid of forgetting their lines or something.”

— Stephen Moyer

“Looking on oneself as something alien, forgetting the sight, remembering the gaze.”

— Franz Kafka

“HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it's like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude ... Also, they don't dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.”

— Nicole Krauss

“His failure to defeat something more powerful than himself, and the scar that reminds him of his failure, is no reason for shame; guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made. Yet the human heart is disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know too well. The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning.
Odd Thomas
Odd Interlude #3 (An Odd Thomas Story)”

— Dean Koontz

“Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.”

— Ivan Klíma

“If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I should have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!”

— Eleanora Duse

“I believe that that foolish man of Galilee, Jesus Christ, had something to tell us, to tell me. Not considering his existence here, I would immediately go into despair. Immediately. And forgetting him, I would first despair of the institutional church and its hierarchy, and only later, of the Jews.”

— Elias Chacour

“Forgetting is something that time takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.”

— Simon Wiesenthal

“I like to do every operation the same way on each fly. In the course of tying a batch of flies, I might get an idea on how to do something differently, but try to save it to try out later rather than break my comfortable rhythm. I don't worry about forgetting it. In my experience good ideas stay with you, while bad ones go back to where they came from, and good riddance.”

— John Gierach

“The heart becomes wide by forgetting self, but narrow by thinking of the self and pitying one's self. To gain a wide and broad heart you must have something before you to look upon, and to rest your intelligence upon - and that something is the God-ideal.”

— Hazrat Inayat Khan

“I still have issues around forgetting that it's my life and if I want to do something, I can do it.”

— Daniel Radcliffe