Jane Yolen Quotes

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.

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.

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

Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

The critics tend to forget their own answers after a while.

I don’t remember the name of the last opponent I have had.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

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

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

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

Remind a man of what he remembers, and you will make him forget it.

My mother just wanted me to forget it. So, of course, every word was immediately, irrevocably branded into my brain.

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.