Oblivion Quotes - Page 11

• The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

  Michel de Certeau

  Practice, Cities, Possibility

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.93, Univ of California Press

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Talk of the imperial decay of your invalid port. Its gracious withdrawal from perfection, keeping a hint of former majesty withal, as it hovers between oblivion and the divine Untergang of infinite recession.

  Stephen Potter

  Perfection, Majesty, Withdrawal

  "One-Upmanship". Book by Stephen Potter, p. 143, 1952.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion.

  Jan Struther

  Weapons, Mood

  Jan Struther (1940). “Mrs. Miniver”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion.

  Jose Saramago

  Needs, Lapses, Poor

  21 Copy quote

• He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)

  George Steiner

  Book, Night, Men

  39 Copy quote

• ...what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.

  Richard Brautigan

  Heart, Blood, Civilization

  5 Copy quote

• In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Writing, Play

  4 Copy quote

• I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I can’t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because there’s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion. You can kiss all over the body. You can kiss yourself to sleep. And when you wake up, you can’t stop thinking about kissing. Dammit, I can’t get anything done because I’m so busy thinking about kissing. Kissing is madness! But it’s absolute paradise, if you can find a good kisser.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Sex, Sleep, Kissing

  "Sufjan Stevens, Robyn, Hot Chip, Blood Orange, Phosphorescent on Arthur Russell Tribute" by Evan Minsker, pitchfork.com. July 15, 2014.

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
  That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
  Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
  Their names without a record are forgot,
  Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dust
  Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust;
  But he whose name is graved in the white stone
  Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.

  Anne Bradstreet

  Kings, Men, Dust

  Anne Bradstreet (1867). “The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse”, p.381

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Apart from a commendable determination to discomfit Trump and members of his inner circle (select military figures excepted, at least for now), journalism remains pretty much what it was prior to November 8th of last year: personalities built up only to be torn down; fads and novelties discovered, celebrated, then mocked; "extraordinary" stories of ordinary people granted 15 seconds of fame only to once again be consigned to oblivion - all served with a side dish of that day's quota of suffering, devastation, and carnage. These remain journalism's stock-in-trade.

  Andrew Bacevich

  Determination, Military, People

  "Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, What Obsessing About You-Know-Who Causes Us To Miss". www.tomdispatch.com. May 7, 2017.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• A lot of young people think they are not going to die - and that's a great thing about being a young person, is living in this carefree oblivion.

  Alex Karpovsky

  Thinking, People, Carefree

  Source: www.avclub.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

  George Orwell

  Truth, Lying, Believe

  34 Copy quote

• History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

  George Santayana

  Kings, History, Interesting

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.378, 谷月社

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If men wound you with injuries, meet them with patience; hasty words rankle the wound, soft language dresses it, forgiveness cures it, and oblivion takes away the scar. It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.

  Francis Beaumont

  Forgiveness, Men, Silence

  4 Copy quote

• Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Change, Made, Willing

  D. H. Lawrence (2008). “Complete Poems by Lawrence: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.540, ReadHowYouWant.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend.

  David Gerrold

  Time, Past, Long

  David Gerrold (1993). “Under the Eye of God”, Spectra

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back
  Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
  A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
  Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd
  As fast as they are made, forgot as soon as done.

  William Shakespeare

  Time, Past, Monsters

  'Troilus And Cressida' (1602) act 3, sc. 3, l. 145

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• He realized that all his life he had been a nobody to everyone. What he now felt was the fear of his own oblivion. It was as though he did not exist.

  Patrick Süskind

  Felt

  "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer". www.imdb.com. 2006.

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Life, Mind, Vacancy

  14 Copy quote

• To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

  W. G. Sebald

  Summer, Fall, Men

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “The Rings of Saturn”, p.18, New Directions Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ultimately, you're left with the people you love and who love you- everything else fades into oblivion.

  Nicole Kidman

  Love You, People, Fades

  FaceBook post by Nicole Kidman from Oct 23, 2016

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.

  Frederick Buechner

  Darkness, Today

  7 Copy quote

• Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.

  Danilo Kis

  Memories, Powerful, Years

  16 Copy quote

• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and swallowing-up of self in an object dearer than self?

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Self, Swallowing, Enthusiasm

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1839). “On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each”, p.223

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• How many after being celebrated by fame have been given up to oblivion; and how many who have celebrated the fame of others have long been dead.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Long, Fame, Given

  Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (2016). “Stoic Six Pack: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion”, p.73, Enhanced Media Publishing

  15 Copy quote

  Show source