forgetfulness Quotes

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

“Real humility lies in self-forgetfulness. Few want to hear this but it’s true, and it can be enormously helpful in life: if you are constantly being hurt, offended, or angered, you should honestly evaluate your inflamed ego.”

“Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

“For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness.”

“To tell you the truth, boss, I don’t know much of anything.”

“He succeeded in having Macondo raised to the status of a municipality and he was therefore its first mayor, and he created an atmosphere of confidence that made people think of the war as an absurd nightmare of the past.”

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

“Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”

“If an earnest person has roused himself, if he is not forgetful, if his deeds are pure, if he acts with consideration, if he restrains himself, and lives according to law,—then his glory will increase.”

“It is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.”

“We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”

“George promised to be good. But it is easy for little monkeys to forget. ”

“Mog was nice but not very clever. She didn’t understand a lot of things. A lot of other things she forgot. She was a very forgetful cat.”

“Not too many professions out there that value forgetfulness. Prostitution, maybe. Politics, of course.”

“I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.”

“You can go and collect some fir-cones for me,” said Kanga, giving them a basket. So they went to the Six Pine Trees, and threw fir-cones at each other until they had forgotten what they came for, and they left the basket under the trees and went back to dinner.

“It shows our club is doing some good in the world. Mrs. Allan says that ought to be our object in everything. I do really try to make it my object but I forget so often when I’m having fun.”

That was Sunday morning, and Monday night Jurgis came home, sober and sick, realizing that he had spent every cent the family owned, and had not bought a single instant’s forgetfulness with it.