You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

You know that the things you put it your head stay there, right?'
'Yeah. But you remember some things, don't you?'
'Yeah. You remember the things you want to forget and forget the things you want to remember.

Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten.

throw away the idea that healing is forgetting the real result is no longer reacting to old triggers with the same intensity as before the memories are still there, but they do not have the same power over your mind

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.

O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

«Стараться забыть кого-то — значит всё время о нём помнить. Любовь тем похожа на укоры совести, что размышления и воспоминания лишь укрепляют её. Чтобы побороть свою страсть, нужно попытаться вовсе о ней не думать.»

Жан де Лабрюйер «Характеры или нравы нынешнего века»

Memory is the art of forgetting.

there is nothing that imprints a thing so vividly on our memory as the desire to forget it.

You forget your feet when the shoes are comfortable. You forget your waist when the belt is comfortable. Understanding forgets right and wrong when the mind is comfortable. There is no change in what is inside, no following what is outside, when the adjustment to events is comfortable. You begin with what is comfortable and never experience what is uncomfortable when you know the comfort of forgetting what is comfortable.