"I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches."

Memory, Story, Life, Destruction

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"I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches."

Exlpore more Memory quotes

"I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off."

Maggie Stiefvater, American Author

Memory, Crows, Sound, Emotion

"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Memory, Truth, Wisdom, Inspirational

"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Understanding, Self, Isolation, Past

"Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Past, Time, Narrative

"He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul."

Dean Koontz, American Author

Memory, Love, Soul, Emotion

"What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Memory, Time, Life, Truth

"Scent is the strongest tie to memory."

Maggie Stiefvater, American Author

Memory, Emotion, Past, Connection

"Some of my anger has faded, but it isn't hard to call back. All I have to do is think about how cold the air was and how loud the laughter was. Look at her. She's a child."

Veronica Roth, American Author

Memory, Anger, Cold, Laughter

"People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie."

Amit Kalantri, Indian Author

Memory, Love, Money, Forget

"It's not that I can't remember. It's that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Memory, Truth, Power, Wisdom

Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading."

Emotion

"All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard."

Humor

"Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit."

Relationship

"I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define."

Emotion

"Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."

Relationship

"You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself."

Emotion

"Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it."

Philosophy

"There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine - "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pA¢tA©."

Humor

"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."

Literature

"Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft."

Emotion