Iggy Pop Quotes

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.

I feel like even if I was to, say, trip and fall over on the way to the car and scratch all my arm, by the time I got in the car, it would be blacked out in my head.

I feel like I've had a lot of painful situations that I intentionally delete from my memory.

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

I have a lot of repression. So repression is what I make movies about.

Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.

Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box.

I bury things in the back of my mind I don't really want to deal with.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

Not everything made you stronger. It was possible to survive, yet still be crippled for your trouble. Sometimes it was okay to run away, to skip the test, to chicken out. Or at least to get some help.

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too.

To be able to forget means sanity.

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.

Only medical hypnosis is capable of opening up amnesia.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

Talking about the show reminds you of things that you went through. So it's fun. When the show was on, I couldn't have handled it. I didn't want that direct connection.

When I was growing up, I was obviously gay, and I got heckled every day of my life. The only way I knew how to survive was to make people laugh. If I could make them laugh, I wouldn't get hung in a locker for two hours. That's a blessing.