Arthur Laurents Quotes

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

I never forget, remember that. Not an action, not a name, not a face.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

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

Elephants and grandchildren never forget.

The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is.

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

I have a theory that I did most of my observing probably before I was twenty, stored it, and am still drawing on it.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

We have to remember everything. If we don't, by the time we grow up it'll be gone forever.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Women and elephants never forget.

One can forgive but one should never forget.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

In small letters, someone has written NEVER FORGET on one of the slats. I know it's supposed to be a pledge, but it feels like a curse. Don't we have to forget some of it? Don't we have to forget this feeling? If we don't, how will we live?

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.