Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.

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

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

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

I feel like even if I was to, say, trip and fall over on the way to the car and scratch all my arm, by the time I got in the car, it would be blacked out in my head.

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

...Things happened when you were little. Things you don't remember now, and don't want to. But they need to escape, need to worm their way out of that dark place in your brain where you keep them stashed.

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

The mind remembers only certain things. The body remembers everything. The information it carries goes back to the beginning of existence.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

There are certain things in life that you never forget. Things that dig deep, things that nest in the hadal zone.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.

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

Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.