back of one's mind

Idioms  

1. The remote part of one's mind or memory, as in With the idea of quitting in the back of his mind, he turned down the next assignment. [c. 1900]

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Example Sentences

None of this will change their minds, a fact that starts a spiral of hopeless despair as the back of one's mind asks: What else will we have to live through before the Republican Party finds its way back to fact-based decision-making?

From Salon

None of this will change their minds, a fact that starts a spiral of hopeless despair as the back of one’s mind asks: What else will we have to live through before the Republican Party finds its way back to fact-based decision-making?

From Slate

To draw the aye-aye, one must take into consideration their coarse fur, bulging eyes, scrawny single finger and over-all rat-like appearance, while keeping the superstition that surrounds it in the back of one’s mind: if an aye-aye points at you with its long finger, the legend goes, you’ve been cursed with an imminent death.

From The Guardian

Watching games live, night after night, for a decade of a team’s history leaves a trail of facts in the back of one’s mind that no amount of studying could plant there.

From Washington Post

“The first moment in the writing process where I sat there and cried,” he told me, “was realizing that while I was having fun writing this mischievous popcorn film, there were real black people who were being abducted and put into dark holes, and the worst part of it is we don’t think about them. I hadn’t been thinking about them. We put them to the back of our minds. That was kind of a trigger point for me, this idea of the back of one’s mind.”

From New York Times