Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
—Michel de Montaigne
It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.
—Gabrielle Zevin in Elsewhere
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It’s amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn’t even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn’t even know had a particular smell.
—Emily Giffin in Something Borrowed
One thing you will probably remember well is any time you forgive and forget.
—Franklin P. Jones
What is forgiven is usually well remembered.
—Louis Dudek
May we remember, as we log on, that half the world's people have never used a telephone, and recall, as we chatter, that most of those around us have no chance to speak or move as they choose. May we recall that more than half a million beings live without food, and that as many children live amidst poverty and war.
—Pico Iyer
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
—Vladimir Nabokov
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
—Paul Harvey
You forget all of it anyway. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.
—Gabrielle Zevin in Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
—George Santayana
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
—Saki
The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
—Thomas Szasz
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
—Mark Twain
Say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved.
—William Congreve
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
—Rudyard Kipling