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Quote by Carmel Mc Mahon

“Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me - halting, hesitating - that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about 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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“We forget all the time. We forget very nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we pid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbage - which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention - the constant replaying of the past - is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to, the exact wording kf the paragraph that you have just read... gone.”

HistoryPerceptionMemoryForgetting
Book:The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
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“Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself. Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.”

LonelinessForgettingRemembering
Book:The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
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“I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”

LonelinessIllusionRejectionCompanionshipForgettingClosenessSlipping AwayKnowing SomeoneGrowing ApartDistancing Self
Book:The Night in Lisbon
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