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"Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says."
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"There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning."

"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."

"Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine."

"When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor."

"Photos're better than nothing, but things're better than photos 'cause the things themselves were part of what was there."

"Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?""I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back."But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her."
Explore more quotes by Sigmund Freud


"That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal."


"We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself."


"Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any."


"I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him."


"It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it."


"Religious doctrines are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."


"I have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible."


"We cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another."


"A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it."
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