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"Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace."
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"Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?"

"I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared."

"This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of 'memory, ' not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing."

"It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer."

"No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself."

"I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed."

"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."

"The Jumble Shop would be one place where we'd sometimes accumulate down in the Village. I think it might be just a place that's unknown that was right around the corner from wherever it was that we met."
Explore more quotes by David Mitchell

"This isn't lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator."

"Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better."

"Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights, the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."

"Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous."

"I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans."

"Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth " I rap my knuckles on the table " "you'll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue."

"But, Henry, this is wicked!' But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. 'The weak are meat, the strong do eat."
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