Anita Brookner Quotes

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting?

Short term memory is not good.

Over time, I've paid attention, taken notes and forgotten easily half of everything I've gone through.

You don't just forget things overnight.

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.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax... and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know.

My biggest problem is retaining the exact information.

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

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

I am terrible with people's names.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

My memory's bad!

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.

I've always been forgetful.

As you get older, you worry about your memory.