All Is Not Forgotten Quotes

“Sitting on my bed with all these things I used to love but not loving them anymore, I just wanted to set them on fire. That's when I knew I was never going to be all right again.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“I wanted to peel myself off of me.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“He was that driven, that smart. But he could not sit still within himself.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Every brain is different. And so must be every course of therapy.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they’d better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“hace falta mucha más entereza para manifestar emociones que para reprimirlas.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“But sometimes it becomes more than that. Sometimes the weaker loves, the lust-driven loves, the filling holes, turn into more. And sometimes those momentary connections, the ones that catch us off guard like a cold wind coming around the corner of a building, sometimes those stay put and then become an anchor for a more permanent connection.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“It requires far more strength to experience emotion than to suppress it.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Una de las grandes vergüenzas de la experiencia humana es que solo sabemos adoptar la conducta adecuada cuando ya es muy tarde.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Things may need to be said, but not necessarily heard by the other.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Feelings do not require justification.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“White lies, black lies, a million lies a million times every day, everywhere, by every one of us. We are all hiding something from someone. This”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy. Yes, we will come to learn that our clay giraffes were not masterly. But when we pull them out of our attics, they should make us cry, knowing that when our parents saw these ugly pieces of plaster, they felt ridiculously misplaced pride, and they wanted to hug us until our bones hurt. This is what we need from our parents, more than the truth about how small we are. We will have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“We have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Tengo muy claro que los hombres tienen una responsabilidad, y que es necesario que se den cuenta de que en cuestiones sexuales no estamos en igualdad de condiciones. Y no solo por fisiología. Por psicología también, porque las chicas todavía se sienten presionadas a hacer cosas que no quieren, y los chicos, los hombres, entienden muy poco cómo lo viven ellas”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“An instinct may explain a reaction. But that does not mean the reaction”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“How is it we can do those things, things that feel permanent, like even if the relationship ended, those feelings would still be there? It makes me not believe in anything, in any feeling, in any profession, in any love at all. It's all just bullshit. Just hormones and lust and needs and filling people's gaps, the holes in their souls. We all just use each other, don't we? Nothing is what it seems.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Empathy is defined this way: “the ability to share and understand the feelings of another.” Women talking for hours at a lunch. Men walking the golf course together every Sunday morning. Teenage girls glued to their phones. This is when we tell our stories, sometimes in meticulous detail, watch the expressions in others as they take in the words. We extract from them their sympathy, their joy, their understanding. We do this so we are not alone as we walk slowly toward our death. Empathy is at the very core of our humanity. Life is pain without it.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“It requires far more strength to experience emotion than to suppress it.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Reading parenting books—and all self-help books, as far as I’m concerned—is the equivalent of learning math from a dog.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“years: You. Your spouse. Your child. Your friends. The people who love you. The people who hate you. Terrorists in the Middle East. The politicians raising your taxes and making bad policies. The teacher who gave your son a bad grade. The couple who didn’t invite you to a dinner. I have gone down this mental path when things have upset me. I find it puts life in perspective. It can be a good thing, to remember that there is very little that truly matters. A bad grade. A dumb politician. A social slight. Unfortunately, there are things that do matter. Things that can ruin what little time we have here. Things that cannot be done over or remedied. These are the things that we regret. And regret is more devious than guilt. It is more corrosive than envy. And it is more powerful than fear.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Charlotte won that fight.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“There is one kind of love that is not amorphous, and that is the love of one’s own child. I spoke about this when discussing Tom Kramer’s childhood, if you recall. Both from an experiential standpoint as well as a clinical one, I know—it’s not just a belief—that we are genetically designed to die for our children. And if we are willing to die for them, we must feel in our bones that they are worthy of our death. And by the course of reason, we must see them as more worthy than everyone else we are not willing to die for. For most of us, with the exception of soldiers who are trained to die for others, that “everyone else” is truly everyone else in the world. We say we would die for our spouses, or at least some people say this, but I do not believe it is true. I do not believe, in that moment of truth, there is any husband who would throw himself in front of that proverbial bus to save his wife. Nor is there a wife who would jump out to spare her husband. Only for a child. Only for a child.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“I know I belabor this analogy, but I have come to see these teenage years as a construction project. I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they’d better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house. The neuroscientists keep moving their conclusion, but the human brain winds down its developing around age twenty-five. What happens between puberty and the midtwenties in the brain, while it is finishing its development—its hardwiring—involves increased risk taking and peer influence. The reward center is trying to sort out what behaviors lead to rewards so it can lay down some wires, some bricks. Those bricks become part of the foundation, and they are there to stay. If those bricks tell you to like alcohol or cocaine or deviant sex acts, you will be fighting those cravings for the rest of your life. And of course, a child who blows off her grades and winds up at a subpar college will have to move to the back of the line when it comes to finding a job. It all matters.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Tenemos tantas ganas de odiar a alguien, de asignarle una culpa e imponerle un castigo, que lo vemos a la peor luz posible, y le imponemos los peores rasgos.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“A las personas las queremos por cómo son, y por cómo nos hacen sentir. Normalmente toleramos sus defectos, y hasta nos los guardamos, pero en cuanto nos vemos reflejados en sus ojos de algún modo que no responda a lo que deseamos ver, a lo que necesitamos ver para sentirnos bien, se rompe la columna vertebral de ese amor.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Pero es que la palabra «amor» pertenece a la esfera del arte, no a la de la ciencia. Cada persona puede describirlo con distintos términos y sentirlo a su manera. Por amor habrá quien llore y quien sonría. Quien se enfade y quien se ponga triste. Quien se excite y quien esté tan satisfecho que el amor le dé sueño.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Deshecha en lágrimas, con el atroz sonido que se hacía eco de ellas por su boca, al final la oyeron y la rescataron. Desde entonces se ha preguntado mil veces por qué nada de lo que tenía dentro —sus músculos, su inteligencia, su fuerza de voluntad— fue capaz de impedir lo que ocurrió. No se acordaba de si había intentado resistirse y pedir ayuda a gritos, o bien se había resignado a que pasara. No la oyó nadie hasta después. Dijo que ahora entiende que cualquier batalla deje un conquistador y un conquistado, un vencedor y una víctima, y que aceptó la realidad: que a ella la habían derrotado por completo, irrevocablemente.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten