Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly did not want to have. That memory would be as unbearable as things are when there is nothing else to do but live with them.

I do not trust the memory. Imaginings too easily become memories, memories imaginings.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

If a painful memory arises, don’t fight it or try to push it away — you’re in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself.

There are remembrances that will not vanish,—
Thoughts of the past we would but cannot banish:
As if to show how impotent mere will,
We loathe the pang, and yet must suffer still:
For who is there can say they will forget?
—It is a power no science teaches yet.

Two elements must therefore be rooted out once for all—the fear of future suffering, and the recollection of past suffering; since the latter no longer concerns me, and the former concerns me not yet.

If a painful memory arises, don't fight it or try to push it away - you're in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself. Feel it. If you have to fake it, fine. It'll become real eventually. Feel the love for yourself as the memory ebbs and flows. That will take the power away.

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings

Even if it's going to be a harmful memory, they don't want to let it go. (This is) why sometimes I get such resistance to the work I do. Because it's telling people that your mind might be full of much more fiction than you realize. And people don't like that.

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you’d once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you’d felt compelled to erase?