Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

The lines are spoken in Cormac McCarthy’s novel *The Road* (2006), in the spare, dialog-driven exchanges between the father and his young son as they travel through a devastated, post-apocalyptic landscape. The father, trying to keep the boy alive and morally intact amid hunger, violence, and constant fear, repeatedly instructs him about what to hold onto internally when the external world has collapsed. In this moment he frames memory and mental “contents” as a kind of permanent possession—one of the few resources the boy can carry without being stolen—while also acknowledging the mind’s cruel selectivity in what it retains and what it discards.

The speaker reflects on memory as both permanent and perversely selective: what we “put into” our minds can lodge there for life, yet recall does not obey our wishes. The exchange captures a central McCarthy preoccupation—the way experience, especially violence or shame, imprints itself and returns unbidden. It also suggests an ethical warning: what one chooses to witness, learn, or dwell on becomes part of one’s inner life, shaping identity long after the moment passes. The final reversal—forgetting what we want to keep and remembering what we want to lose—underscores the tragic irony of consciousness, where trauma and regret can be more durable than comfort or meaning.