Quotes About Memory

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. 'You've grown up so fast,' Robert's mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. 'Look at you." But she's wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night.

a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." from "Village 113

She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. "Goodbye, Werner." "Goodbye, Marie-Laure.

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it," Rex says, "or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become." Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

Does it matter? In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life - this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.

The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they'd walk past our door.

he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, "I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come." He pauses, fumbling to translate. "The song, light of the moon?" She almost smiles.

Repository," he finally says, "you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.

Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

His mind, while he works, is almost quiet, almost calm. This is an act of memory.

First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.

It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.

If only she had brought her novel down with her.

Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

The voice is like something from a long-ago dream.

split by the knobs of her vertebrae. She used to fall asleep holding his index finger in her fist. She used to sprawl with her books beneath the key pound bench and move her hands like spiders across the pages. "Am I to stay here?" "With Madame. And Etienne." He hands her a towel and helps her climb onto the tile and waits outside