William Gibson Quotes

Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need.

I'm not at the hoarder stage, but there are two or three storage units here and there. I have things that a lot of people put a lot of heart and soul into, a lot of mental energy. I'm good at keeping those things. When it comes to pop culture, as you move through this fast lane, you wonder where it all goes and how you can hold onto it.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting?

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

A good forgettery is a happier possession than a good memory.

... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

I suppose that we are only young, Chris, so long as we can forget. After that we merely remember!

I'm impossible to forget, but I'm hard to remember.

Like it takes so little not only to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

You know how it is: as soon as you decide to forget something, your brain comes to the conclusion that it's the most fascinating thing in the world.

I can forgive, I just can't forget.