Desmond Tutu Quotes

What happens in the past, is in the past. But don't be surprised if it comes back and haunts you.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

My wife is a former homicide detective, LAPD. The wonderful thing that I was able to capture is my wife's experiences from human and professional, and how do you deal with some of the atrocities that happen in L.A. and not bring them home.

If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people.

For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.

I think when people are repressing things, or burying things, that can manifest in all sorts of ways.

It's not good for you to be barred from traveling to certain places in your head because some skeleton is in the closet.

If you don't work through the things that haunt you early, they'll stay with you for the rest of your life.

I feel like I've had a lot of painful situations that I intentionally delete from my memory.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

What you don't deal with rules your life.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

Don't take your bad shots home with you.

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.