Sara Zarr Quotes

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

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

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

Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.

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.

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting?

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

Remind a man of what he remembers, and you will make him forget it.

Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?

Sometimes things are better off forgotten.

You don't need the painful memories, because either you've resolved them. Denying always makes them want to come back. Denial is a mechanism that doesn't work. But allowing them to come back in little by little, those memories, you can begin to be quite comfortable with them, and it's even nice to have that as part of the map of your life.

I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.

You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.