Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I think pain is a very - it's an extremely hard thing to empathize moment to moment. And you often don't remember your own pain, you know, that moment that you broke a limb or you burned yourself or, I think, this is a common thing that women talk about with childbirth, that the memory of the pain is hard to summon up and relive, thankfully.

The one who throws the stone forgets; the one who is hit remembers forever.

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.

When we forgive someone, we do not forget the hurtful act, as if forgetting came along with the forgiveness package, the way strings come with a violin. Begin with the basics. If you forget, you will not forgive at all. You can never forgive people for things you have forgotten about. You need to forgive precisely because you have not forgotten what someone did; your memory keeps the pain alive long after the hurt has stopped. Remembering is the storage of pain. It is why you need to be healed in the first place.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.

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.

There are some hurts that we experience that can be forgiven but we won't forget them.

It was Kovacs who said "Mother" then, muffled under latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again.

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

Memory in America suffers amnesia.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

You ever tried to pick up your teeth with a bunch of broken fingers

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth point goes.

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

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

In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.