Joshua Foer Quotes

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.

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.

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.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

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

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

My memory's bad!

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

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

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.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

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.

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

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.