Ben Gibbard Quotes

The past was so past it hurt.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.

A lot of my stories about the old days, they're delicious and funny. But every time I recall the early days, it's painful. With every anecdote, it's painful because you're summoning up the terribly, terribly difficult life of my parents. And it's painful because I didn't realize at the time how hard it was for them.

There is nothing on earth that could ever make me want to relive certain years of my life when I was young.

I do tend to divide my childhood into darkness and light, and the first seven years were certainly the darkness.

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.

Acting brings up a lot of the past. I use my memories, whether they're good or bad.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (last lines)

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

I wish I had a talking book that told me how to act and look, a talking book that contained keys to past and present memories

No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.

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

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

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Pleasant is the recollection of dangers past.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

I'm of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don't know if I have any regrets.

there was a time when these weren't memories.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.