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Palimpsest Quotes

Browse 17 quotes about Palimpsest.

Palimpsest Quotes

“Every act of reading is an act of forgetting: the experience of reading is a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers those that came before. Those books that allow us to forget the most are accorded he authority of the classic.”

ScienceReadingForgettingClassicsCanonHistory Of SciencePalimpsest
Book:Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
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“The journey through another world, beyond bad dreams beyond the memories of a murdered generation, cartographed in captivity by bare survivors makes sacristans of us all. The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes. Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymns upon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voice transforms the ways of song to words of poetry or prose and makes distinctions no one recognizes. Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscans on the edge of useless law; we pray to the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistle in ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chain of incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome.”

HopeFreedomResilienceGenerationPalimpsestSword SentimentsZugunruhe
Author:Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
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“How bizarre to be here once again. The scene conjures itself before me like a terrible magic trick, a palimpsest. There had been fewer cars. The lot wasn't paved then. The supermarket had been smaller, less modern, and named something else. But the general angles, the spatial arrangements, the site at the top of the hill: yes. Déjà vu ripples through me like a bad lunch beginning to announce itself hours before the final disaster. My stomach twists, and I feel an unease settle. I never thought I would return. I told myself I never would.”

TerrorDeja VuPalimpsestTremors
Book:Dark Things I Adore
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“Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.”

ThinkingWayMindMeanI CanPlayCharacterUseRealityAgeLastsFilmMemoriesWrittenEventsStrangeThousandTenTheaterLegsBrokePalimpsest
Author:Gore Vidal
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“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.”

KnowsFeelsBookWholeStoriesBodyHandsLightEyeCertainReadingSecretToo MuchWrittenLettersLifetimeCodeVisibleAccumulationBraillePalimpsest
Book:Written On The Body
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“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

WayNeedsHas BeensMadeMomentsPastPoliticalPoliticsPartyOpinionRecordsMinutesExpressionNewsEvidenceCleanPredictionsDocumentariesItemsUp To DatePalimpsest
Book:Animal Farm and 1984
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“I will write in words of fire. I will write them on your skin. I will write about desire. Write beginnings, write of sin. You’re the book I love the best, your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.”

WritingBookEndsDreamAgeDesireLinesSinFireYouthDramaLettersSkinsFinalsTalesBuriedShelvesDuskRewritingMy TruthPalimpsest
Author:Neil Gaiman
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