Samantha Shannon Quotes

...You can't unlearn something, even if you want to. You know what you know.

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

You can't take away knowledge, and it's dangerous to pretend you never had it.

every mind is at least as heavy as mine

I only know that from wherever it is that we're going there can be no turning back

His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.

We all would love sometimes to be free from our own knowledge. It is even the most difficult to unlearn - as the most important problems are.

Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all.

He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.

Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.

There are some things children cannot know, because once they learn them they are no longer children.

Either grant me the bliss of the ignorant or give me the strength to bear the knowledge.

When you get asked hundreds of questions, it's not possible to remember the answer to every one.

Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind.

The audience goes to sleep really quickly! If you have a slight pause at the wrong time, that's it!

Any parting could be forever, and we don't know.

I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

Learn it all, then forget it all.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.