Loren Eiseley Quotes

I don't remember lighting this cigarette and I don't remember if I'm here alone or waiting for someone.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

It is the lot of man to suffer; it is also his fortune to forget. Oblivion and sorrow share our being, as darkness and light divide the course of time.

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?

The thing is, the more you fear death, the more you die. So it really doesn't pay off. It's a fear of the dark. Like any experience in life, you wonder, Well, if this ever happens, how would I react? and then it happens, and only then do you know.

There's a meeting in Command. Disregard your current schedule,' he says. 'Done,' I say. 'Did you follow it at all today?' he asks in exasperation. 'Who knows? I'm mentally disoriented.' I hold up my wrist to show my medical bracelet and realize it's gone. 'See? I can't even remember they took my bracelet.' (Katniss and Boggs)

Destiny is always dark.

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud And goes down burning into the gulf below, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud At what has happened. Birds, at least must know It is the change to darkness in the sky. Murmuring something quiet in her breast, One bird begins to close a faded eye; Or overtaken too far from his nest, Hurrying low above the grove, some waif Swoops just in time to his remembered tree. At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe! Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see Into the future. Let what will be, be.

Enlightenment is scary. Sometimes things look better in the dark.

I'll never know what it was he wanted me to remember.

She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.

In the dark, all cats are grey.

oblivion has been noticed as the offspring of silence.

Hillary Clinton told the FBI 39 times she couldn't remember anything. I couldn't remember, I couldn't remember. Or recall key events concerning illegal server and related misconduct.

When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.

Is there anybody hiding there in the dark?

Hey, if you can't remember, don't worry about it. I'm having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I've been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

In rain during a dark night, enter that darkness.

Silence is like nightfall. Objects are lost in it insensibly.

Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?

I don't even know my own phone number.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool.