Sholem Asch Quotes

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

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

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

I always find it extremely hard to remember the act of beginning. I almost deliberately forget it.

We forget how quickly the American people forget.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

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

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

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

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

If I have something I like to forget, then I forget it.