Robertson Davies Quotes

You get to a point in your life where you go, 'I don't remember what I did.'

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

Time's the thief of memory

You know, as you get older, the first thing you lose is memory. It seems to be happening with me.

At 60, I could do the same things I could do at 30, if I could only remember what those things are.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

As you get older, you worry about your memory.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

Continents of memory had been lost.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

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.

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours´ sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold, Let it be forgotten forever and ever, Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

Just because you're old that doesn't mean you're more forgetful. The same people whose names I can't remember now I couldn't remember fifty years ago. . .

All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind, Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune, Following the donkey's bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses, On the high door of a skull and in some corner, Of an irrefrangible eye, Some old man memory jumps to a child - Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

I don't remember what I did fifty years ago.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

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

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

That's the privilege of old age: You don't have to remember.