Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting.

It's wrong to become a bully yourself or to take it out on other people, and in my case, I just retreated to a place where I was safe. And that place was my imagination, books, and television.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

America's a very traumatized society.

There are certain realities we must speak of with our children that were not present when I was a child.

The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore that was like a war zone, so I never learned to trust that there were people who could help me.

I go down to my little hut, where it's tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.

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

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

Whether it's a kid in high school who doesn't have any friends and finds friends in my characters, or a guy in Afghanistan, who's trying to forget what he did that day, and trying not to think about what he's gotta do tomorrow... I give them a little bit of an escape.

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work

I've never experienced complete terror, knock on wood, or running for my life or any of that.

I'd been to Mosul and back and forth to Iraq and Latin America, and it was all quite harrowing... and I felt like I wanted a month or two of total escapism.

When people are in crisis and pose a threat to themselves or others, those closest to them are often the first to see the warning signs.

I feel like I've had a lot of painful situations that I intentionally delete from my memory.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

We need to start identifying the triggers that aggravate mental health issues in our society - bullying, social media negativity and anxiety, gender based violence, substance abuse, stigma around issues such as maternal issues, etc., and we need to speak up about these more and get to the source of the problems.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

The world is really heading in a very dangerous direction, it becomes that much more valuable and important to go to the movies and see human beings that are human beings.