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"Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet."
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"I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't."

"I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once."

"By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself."

"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

"Gone are the summer daysand my mind along with them.No longer will I indulgein hopes of getting you back.It is hope that makes these chains heavierand autumnal nights longer.I will merely serve as a memory to you:the lover that recited love poems.I must go nowand I urge you not to look back."
Explore more quotes by David Mitchell

"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."

"There're times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice."

"Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me."

"The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral."

"She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman."

"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."

"One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner."

"The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning."
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