Self-Erasure Quotes

An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.

I grew up as a step-kid, always a little outside, always trying hard to follow and fit in. But over time, I've come to feel that my tendency toward self-erasure is a deep and real part of me. I think I'd be this way no matter how I grew up.

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed.

Work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as things move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves.

As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity.

This is the kind of world I was born in, one in which I had only one reason for existence: pleasing others.

But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.

I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by others, but wishes to plunge from himself into himself, to become nothing, as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in himself, he is completely with God

No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

I’m not anyone,” he says. “I’m nobody. That’s what being factionless is.

I was tired of playing a ghost.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.

Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.

Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.

I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible