Sigmund Freud Quotes

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

But even Es and cocaine, over the years they blow holes in your brain, rob you of your memories, your past. Which is fair enough, convenient even.

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

Normal people have nothing to forget.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

Shame has poor memory.

What you remember saves you.

I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

I'm alone. And I'm crying. And no one is coming to the crib. And the nightlight has burned out. And I'm mad. I'm so mad. Left frontal lobe. I...I...I don't feel so good. Left occipital lobe. I... don't remember where...Left parietal lobe. I...I...I can't remember my name,but...but...Right temporal...but I'm still here. Right frontal. I'm still here... Right occipital.I'm still...Right parietal. I'm...Cerebellum. I'm...Thalamus. I...Hypothalamus. I...Hippocampus...Medulla.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It's hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?