Arthur Helps Quotes

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

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

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

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

There is nothing that makes a man more self-satisfied than a poor memory.

Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.

There are people you remember and people you dream of.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

The things we remember best are those better forgotten.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

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

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

You probably wouldn't remember. I probably couldn't forget.