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"The clock's pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman's form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn. She places her cool palms on Jacob's fever-glazed face.Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes. Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows. A well-waxed paper door slides open."
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Exlpore more Memory quotes
"She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless."
"Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me."
"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."
"Things come into your memory even when you don't want them to, that is because 'pratikraman dosh' is pending (mistake for which pratikraman was not done yet)."
"It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all."
"Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's."
"Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far)."
"I want to take all our best moments, put them in a jar, and take them out like cookies and savor each one of them forever."
Explore more quotes by David Mitchell
"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."
"Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm.""You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?"
"It's like the British in Ireland in 1916' , says Oisir O'Dowd. 'The repeated the ageless macho mantra, "Force is the only thing these natives understand, so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed."
"Oh, once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back. Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. "We-by whom I mean anyone over sixty-commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight."
"I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People."
"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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