Our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.
... some of the best sex I can barely remember.
I woke up many mornings not knowing what I'd done the night before. I'm amazed I'm not dead.
As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.
I'm one of those who cut off seeing people after a certain time, when the weight is gone and they sound like the dementia is very advanced - I don't want to see that. I don't even go in to look at the body. That's not my last memory.
I couldn't imagine living the way I used to live. Now people come up to me from the drug days and go, 'Hi, remember me?' And I'm going, 'No, did I have sex with you? Did I take a dump in your tool box?'
Right. I'd forgotten about her.' He shook his head. 'That keeps happening.
Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.
Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
Last Friday night; Yeah we danced on tabletops. And we took too many shots. Think we kissed, but I forgot?
...and down they forgot as up they grew.
I pray I die before they day comes when I do not know if my sons are infants or grandfathers.
I woke up one time coming out of a blackout, and I was on an airplane, descending to land in Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. And all I can think is I must have decided it was a good idea to go to France, and got my passport, and got on a plane.
This new world which is being born is cynical and amnesiac. And it has eliminated perspective.
For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again. Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling is like a festival outside my window.
Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.
I do mean this - I had the good fortune of being around a number of Alzheimer's patients in the last three years of my mother's life. She was in a care facility that was devoted to just people with memory-loss issues. I found those people engaging and generous in ways that I had not imagined.
Sometimes I get off stage, and I almost have no recollection of what happened. It's almost like a trance; it's very bizarre.
Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.
Every day your memory grows dimmer - it doesn't haunt me like it did before.
That's the beauty of alcohol. If you don't remember it, it didn't happen.
One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.
You can never say never. I'm not sure if I even want to. I just don't know. Some of it is just not able to be reached, you can't remember some of it and the people that could help you remember have passed away. It might have to remain a remain.
Where are the songs I used to know, Where are the notes I used to sing? I have forgotten everything I used to know so long ago. ("The Key-Note")
