Memory Erasure Quotes

MKULTRA

When I was doing 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' I was asked, 'If there was one part of your life that you could erase, what would it be?' And I was so stunned by that. I thought: 'Nothing.' I would keep all the good bits and the bad bits, because those things made me who I am.

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.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

Have you ever walked along a shoreline, only to have your footprints washed away? That's what Alzheimer's is like. The waves erase the marks we leave behind, all the sand castles. Some days are better than others.

The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.

“Never again” doesn’t reckon with money’s ability to erase memory.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

I thought 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' was so interesting the way it was made and the texture of it.

History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

You keep on trying to airbrush history.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

We cannot even recollect the actions of our infancy, our childhood is like something written on a slate and rubbed off.

We know that if memory is destroyed in one part of the brain, it can be sometimes re-created on a different part of the brain. And once we can unravel that amino chain of chemicals that is responsible for memory, I see no reason why we can't unlock it and, essentially, wipe out what's there.

The future will use and dispose of the memories of people that we knew as history sees fit.

A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.

In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.

What could you give me," I ask, my voice shaking, "to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?