Forgotten Quotes

“These are the few ways we can practice humility:

To speak as little as possible of one's self.

To mind one's own business.

Not to want to manage other people's affairs.

To avoid curiosity.

To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.

To pass over the mistakes of others.

To accept insults and injuries.

To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.

To be kind and gentle even under provocation.

Never to stand on one's dignity.

To choose always the hardest.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“...it is sad, of course, to forget.
But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.
To remember when no one else does.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of, the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends, and a more-than minor life.

And then i screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no sugar-coating it: She deserved better friends.

When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified. into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it spite of having lost her.

Beacause I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know that she forgives me for being dumb and sacred and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I know:

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere.

I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirety. There is a part of her knowable parts. And that parts has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, One thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed.

And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself -those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.

When adults say "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are.

We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Eidson's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green , Looking for Alaska

“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Stephen Carpenter, Killer

“Only the forgotten are truly dead.”
― Tess Gerritsen, The Sinner

“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If we go down the rabbit hole of our unconsciousness and try to unravel the knotty points of our life story we may encounter a bunch of hidden niceties or emotional stowaways. Forgotten details in the windmill of our mind may daintily reveal, where things might have gone wrong. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“I've never stopped; I simply forgot that I love you. However, every time I look at you I'm reminded of how I can never stop loving you.”
― Hafsa Shah

“Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. ”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“A lot we have in our head,
But things of heart are not yet dead,
They have done none, but just fled,
Out of us, Forgotten, just been bled..”
― Numey

“She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“I want to believe that memories, even sad and painful ones, should not be forgotten forever.”
― Momiji Sohma

“And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
― W.H. Auden

“The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I stare off into space for a minute. "I just wish my life would go back to the way it was."
"Why?"
"Because I was happy then. Things weren't perfect, but still, I knew where I fit. I knew where I was going."
"And you don't feel that way anymore?"
"No. I feel kind of...lost in the middle of my own life, if that makes any sense.”
― Catherine McKenzie, Forgotten

“Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“If you become too readily available to people, they begin to take you for granted; pull away, and they will clamor for you. It's a subconscious thing our society has created in the minds of the masses. This is why most of the "greats" didn't become recognized until after their death. If you're overlook, rejoice, maybe your one of the future greats.”
― Dara Reidyr

“...in addition to feeling sick and tired and feverish and nauseated, I also felt forgotten. And there was no easy cure for that.”
― Sarah Thebarge

“There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.
Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable.”
― Toba Beta

“I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else-what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?”
― Peter S. Beagle , The Last Unicorn

“Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“But that was New Orleans for you. The old didn’t die here. They were just forgotten.”
― Amanda Stevens, The Dollmaker

“I left a lifetime of vigilance piled on the ground like a forgotten coat.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Serpent and the Wings of Night

“I try to remember a face that once brought happiness to my days, though it's slipped my memory for now. Lips that once said, "Rest with your dream in my dream." But now, I journey through the shadows alone, accompanied only by nameless beasts that steal my memories.”
― Rolf van der Wind

“You were part of my life once, but not anymore.”
― Dina Husseini