Richard Rodriguez Quotes

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.

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

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

I feel like even if I was to, say, trip and fall over on the way to the car and scratch all my arm, by the time I got in the car, it would be blacked out in my head.

The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering. But I tried to forget anyway, and to ignore the fact that I was remembering you all the time.

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.

If I have something I like to forget, then I forget it.

Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

The one who throws the stone forgets; the one who is hit remembers forever.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

When we forgive someone, we do not forget the hurtful act, as if forgetting came along with the forgiveness package, the way strings come with a violin. Begin with the basics. If you forget, you will not forgive at all. You can never forgive people for things you have forgotten about. You need to forgive precisely because you have not forgotten what someone did; your memory keeps the pain alive long after the hurt has stopped. Remembering is the storage of pain. It is why you need to be healed in the first place.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

What you try to bury just ends up burying you.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.