Forgotten Events Quotes

An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.

So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

I didn't even recall being on the DB sessions until Herbie Flowers reminded me a couple of years ago.

Nobody gives a damn about the Merrimac. You know how it is. Winners write the history books.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.