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Quote by Carmel Mc Mahon

“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”

Quote by Carmel Mc Mahon

Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History

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Carmel Mc Mahon

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“But guilt at the missing details hampered my ability to remember, forced me to put off asking more detailed questions. It was already clear that I would one day (when I became that better version of myself) open a special notebook and sit down with my mother, and she would start at the very beginning, and then there would be some meaning to it all – and a system, a family tree, and every cousin and nephew would be in their rightful place, and at the end of it there would be a book.”

MemoryFamily History
Book:In Memory of Memory
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“My blissful childhood was shattered without warning when I was about ten years old. One day, my father told me that he had spent seventeen years of his life in prisons, Gulag labor camps, and internal exile. At that moment, his confession became the greatest shock I had ever experienced. “My father — the kindest and wisest man on earth — and suddenly this?” I refused to believe my own ears. But my dad did not stop at the bare fact. He spoke of hunger, of cruelty, of utter powerlessness — and of his own horrific existence within a totalitarian, inhuman system. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One. Author's Preface Context note: This passage comes from the author’s preface and reflects a real childhood revelation that became the moral and emotional foundation of the novel. Learning that his father had survived years of prisons, labor camps, and exile under the Soviet totalitarian system, the author transformed personal memory into a literary quest to understand repression, trauma, and human endurance.”

MemoirSoviet UnionChildhood MemoriesFamily HistoryGenerational TraumaGulagPolitical RepressionAutobiographical FictionHistorical TraumaMoralawakening
Book:Камень. Биографический роман: Часть первая. Первые шаги к свету и обратно
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“History is often told through grand events and famous names. I wanted to tell a story about the people who rarely make the headlines—the ones who got up every day, did the work in front of them, and quietly moved the world forward one field, one family, one small-town decision at a time.”

Historical FictionFamily HistoryWesterns19th Century America
Book:The Ordinary Grit: Courage Under an Unforgiving Sky
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“There was something about the people you grew up around, the ones you'd seen throughout your childhood, the folks you couldn't remember not knowing. Even if the past was a complicated mess, as you aged, you were just glad the sons of bitches were still on the planet. It gave you the illusion that life wasn't as fragile as it actually was--and on occasion, that was the only thing that got you through the night.”

FamilySiblingsFamily History
Book:Lover at Last
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“I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond. And their eyes were my eyes. As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as tomorrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father's hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and is not yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one, born of Woman, Son of Man, had in the Image, fashioned in the Womb by the Will of God, the eternal Father. I was one of them, they were of me, and in me, and I in all of them.”

TimeForefathersFamily HistoryLineageGeneologyFamily LineFamily Forever
Book:HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY
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