forgetting

Then one morning she__ begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn__ remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she__ realized again what she__ learned at five when her mother left _ that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she__ worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother__ voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree__ heartwood. (51)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting...

Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.

You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles.

If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate.

The irony of lifeIs our greatest fear is to forget,Yet it's the only certain fateThat anything has ever met.We know one day our earthWill find itself victim to time,That nothing will be leftTo tell of your story or mine,And still through life we rushScrambling for something to remember,Perish the thought that ash be ashAnd not the memory of an ember.

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

Love is never hurtful; It__ never about forgetting who you are, it__ about exploring yourself more.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

Like hatred, guilt can__ be locked in the silence of forgetting, without taking part of your soul with it.

I know you__e just a rag doll now, sewn together with memories that we might have had. I know you__e just the dream inside of a dream And don__ worry, I know I don__ know you, anymore.

How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that is the truth.

Memories: some can be sucker punching, others carry you forward; some stay with you forever, others you forget on your own. You can__ really know which ones you__l survive if you don__ stay on the battlefield, bad times shooting at you like bullets. But if you__e lucky, you__l have plenty of good times to shield you.

Memories are never as true as the things one forgets.

Intense feelings of any kind keep people with you. Some you may want, others you won't. To forget people, and you never really forget, feel indifference.

Ignorance might be bliss. But self-forgetfulness is pure ecstasy.

My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.