Paul Auster Quotes

Boy, you know, it's amazing how your brain can turn into a sieve, and you can literally forget episodes that you have shot.

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

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

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

My memories of events and games are fragmented.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time. And I think that ties back to what I learned watching my grandmother lose her memories is, you know, we are all facing erasure eventually.

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

You never know how much a man can't remember until he is called as a witness.

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

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

I had amnesia once or twice.

And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never happened? Will none of the things you saw or thought or dreamed matter?

You try and remember, but it never works.

Like a tree losing its leaves. I forget even the thing I was thinking.

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.