"Remembering’s dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. “The Past Tense,” I suppose you’d call it. Memory’s so treacherous. One moment you’re lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candy-floss… the next, it leads you somewhere you don’t want to go. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you’d hoped were forgotten. Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can’t face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren’t contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause! So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit… you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… forever."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
The Joker, Batman: The Killing Joke, (1988) by Alan Moore with art by Brian Bolland.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Memory
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Memory
231 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Memory →
Related Quotes
"It is possible for one with a well-trained memory to compose clearly in an organized fashion on several different sub…"
"A long text must always be broken up into short segments, numbered, then memorized a few pieces at a time."
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
"The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that ha…"
"Since each phantasm is a combination not only of the neutral form of the perception, but of our response to it (inten…"
"One must have a rigid, easily retained order, with a definite beginning. Into this order one places the components of…"
"Human memory is one of the worst data-collection devices in the world."
"Memory is merely the process of tuning into vibrations that have been left behind in space and time."
"What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void The world can nev…"
"Even what we hear must be attached to a visual image. To help recall something we have heard rather than seen, we sho…"