Quotes About Memories

When the balloons are out, as they often are, we raise our glasses at the sky before we drink.

He hugs her to him. When Charlie was little he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.

At Playland, Eddie and the little boys had ridden potato sacks down long wooden slides, getting friction burns where a knee or an elbow dragged against the wood. The fun-house floor was pocked with holes through which loud blasts of air (fired by some hidden wiseacre) were meant to lift girls' skirts. Ingrid had a horror of these blasts, and she clung to Eddie, laughing.

Experience leaves a mark, regardless of the reasons and principles behind it.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Days in a house with children grind by like glaciers, but the years rush by like wind.

It's true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art's eyes, she resembled our mother. I can't look at Mike's face without seeing Dad's. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

The air smelled of sweet ocean, a special thing. As a little girl she'd identified a half dozen ways the sea could smell, briny or fishy or sandy or green. A few times each summer, for reasons she couldn't explain, the breeze smelled of molasses, dark and sweet. ….

She lay awake and thought of her mother, gone forever. There was no one else she wanted to tell.

As psychoanalysis has made so clear, human beings move through life dictated to by a mess of conscious and unconscious memories, acts and feelings. The language of art is a reflection of this: it's one of slippages, ambiguities and contradictions that are communicated via images, which are, by their very nature, indeterminate.

I hope that when I'm 80 years old, people will still be talking about my wedding.

I had to learn how to chop wood actually - I don't think my dad would have let me go chop wood in the backyard growing up.

I grew up in the Bronx where you would stay up late with your girlfriends, just being silly in our bedrooms, whatever. And I was always the clown.

It's not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It's the good ones.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?

But now all I could think about was that, yes, Harry used to scowl when I outmaneuvered him on the chess board, but his eyes had gleamed. He'd called me princess and horrible girl, and I'd called him old man.

Your grandfather was a piece of work," I told Xander. He picked up a fourth scone. "I agree. In his honor, I eat this scone." He did just that.

Toby hadn't written a message on the wall of his bedroom. He'd written tens of thousands of words across all the walls in the suite. Toby Hawthorne had kept a diary. His whole life was documented on the walls of his wing of Hawthorne House. He couldn't have been more than seven or eight when he'd started writing.

But after reading even just a couple of my mom's postcards? It was getting harder to ignore Grayson's presence beside me, harder not to think about Jameson. My eyes stung, even though there was zero reason for me to be crying.

The things that haunt us, they make us human.

Between the fire and a storm that night," Alisa said, once she'd recovered, "Toby's remains were never definitively found.

I stood there, staring at Ivy, a hundred thousand thoughts and memories and moments rushing through my head. And then I got on the plane. And then I shattered.

Jameson bringing me closer to Grayson instead of pushing me away. I held the picture out, and Grayson's fingers brushed mine as he took it.

Today's your birthday, too.