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Remembering Quotes

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Remembering Quotes

“Do you remember what we just did? Please tell me you remember what we just did." She briefly toyed with the idea of lying and saying no, just to see the look on his face, but she'd had enough of having her brain played with – it wouldn't be too sporting to do the same to him. "Yes, I remember, and don't you think for one minute that just because you had me on my back screaming I was 'yours'," she waved four fingers in quotation marks in front of his face, "that it gives you any kind of ownership over me, because it doesn't." He looked annoyed, then relieved, then he laughed. "Yeah, whatever, baby.”

“Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.”

“A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.”

“The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.”

“What is that look for?' Dain whispers. 'What look?' I ask as the distant roar of a dragon echoes off the stone walls. ... 'The one where someone just sucked the joy out of your world,' Dain responds, bending his head slightly and keeping his voice low enough that only I can hear him. I could lie to him, but that would make our semi-truce even more awkward. 'I was just remembering the guy I used to climb trees with, that's all.' He startles like I've slapped him.”

“If Eric had just listened to his heart and not someone else's singing, none of this would have happened. He had fallen in love with the voiceless red-haired girl. He was just too stupid and obstinate to recognize it. He loved everything about her. Her smile, the way she moved, the way she took delight in everything around her. She was impulsive, unmannered, willing to get dirty, a little strange, and extremely hands-on. And beautiful. So different from all the princesses and ladies his parents had introduced him to.”

“I Understand Mom The fog wraps around her mind bits and pieces of tattered thought become blank within her eyes minutes ago is gone, the sadness inside. Reaching for a wonderful memory that was just an hour ago you fight so hard to bring it back until you finally let it go. I’m sorry, I don’t remember as the tears reach her face tears roll down a beautiful smile while your days are being erased. I understand Mom; I’m here for you there’s blessings at our door God is here, He will guide us through with His love and so much more.”

“Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores.”

“She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes. She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean. I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.”

“The songs transported her backwards in time, to when she first wrote them. As each one melted into the next, as her voice sang lyrics and melodies from her past, memories burst like colors across a blank canvas. Because inside each and every one of these songs---songs she'd written before she ever left Edgewood---memories were hidden. Emeline choked on them. Hot tears burned in her eyes as she tapped the next file, and the next, racing through songs and, with them, memories that had been stolen from her. Images of a younger Sable flashed before her eyes, interwoven with a younger Rooke. And someone else. Hawthorne. He was everywhere, with his dark hair and strange eyes. Her songs were so full of him, Emeline felt like she was drowning in him. Hawthorne, sitting next to the fire, reading a book. Hawthorne, shucking off his shirt and diving into a moonlit pond. Hawthorne, climbing in through her bedroom window. Kissing her in the dark. She'd embedded him inside her music. Because songs were never just songs for Emeline. They were capsules, each one containing a moment trapped inside it. As the next one started to play through her headphones, an image of a tree rose up in her mind. Emeline could see its thirsty roots; the twisting, twirling gray-brown bark; the gnarly branches stretching towards the sky. A silent sentinel, standing guard at the edge of the woods. Her tree.”

“You grieve at first. And then slowly, with the yawning of the years, the disappeared gets scraped from your memory, the way your flesh can be peeled from your limbs. It's very harsh and extremely painful. But it gets done, square inch-by-square inch. Until, the skin that is your memory gets completely scarred and numbed. You live. The disappeared is detached from the dermis of remembering. And that is what is known as moving on.”

“Rhys only peered over his broad shoulder, to the cheerful restaurant behind us. 'That first night we were all here,' he said, and I followed his gaze, watching the workers set the tables with loving precision. 'When you told Sevenda that you felt awake while eating her food...' He shook his head. 'It was the first time you looked... peaceful. Like you were indeed awake, alive again. I was so relieved I thought I'd puke right onto the table.' ... I linked arms with him before saying, 'You and this city helped wake me up- helped bring me back to life.' His eyes flickered as I smiled up at him. 'I will fight with everything I have, too, Rhys. Everything.' He only kissed the top of my head, tugging me closer as we crossed the Sidra under the starry sky.”

“There’s something beautiful about going through pictures from decades ago and saying, ‘Remember?’ You can’t do that with somebody new. There’s nothing to remember. There’s no shared history—only the brand new. I wanted to remember with someone. I wanted to remember all of it—the first kiss, the first time, the first child, the first graduation. But I never found someone to remember with.”

“What is the one thing that gets you up every morning? The one thing that keeps you going every day, every month, every year? Let me get you started. My one thing is this, ‘I'm one day closer...’ One day closer to a goal, an outcome, or the results I'm after in my life. This is my way of remembering the importance of focusing on the life I desire and living a life of gratitude! So, what’s your one thing…?”

“Most of us live in the past and resist living in a new future. Why? The body is so habituated to memorizing the chemical records of our past experiences that it grows attached to these emotions. In a very real sense, we become addicted to those familiar feelings. So when we want to look to the future and dream of new vistas and bold landscapes in our not-too-distant reality, the body, whose currency is feelings, resists the sudden change in direction.”

“I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley's nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she wanted. 'Red or yellow?' Which did she choose? I can't remember. Perhaps she alternated. Perhaps there were other colours. It didn't happen once. It happened again and again. I had no power to stop it. That man, my father, had some control over me. I was drugged by the black silence in that big house, the vile whiff of aftershave, the crushing torment of inevitability. My father fucked Shirley using red or yellow condoms and it was those condoms that brought it all to an end. It was my last realization of the day; any more would have been too much to contemplate. That time when my mother had found used condoms in bedroom, he had admitted, after a pointless burst my father's of denial, that he had been going to prostitutes. That was no doubt true but I can't imagine clients take used condoms away with them; prostitutes would surely get rid of the things. No. My father kept those used condoms as a prize. He was fucking his fourteen-year-old-daughter. He was proud of it. Rebecca welled up with tears. Poor thing, she kept saying. Poor thing.”

“Put that thing down, girl. Don't you know it steals part of your soul, that little mechanical masterpiece you hold so frivolously? Don't you know it's not just mine it seals into its gears and trick mirrors, but yours, too. What you feel at this moment, what you hope for, what your dreams are, what you think your future will unfold like, it steals it all from you, too. You aren't safe just because of the side of the lens you're on. And later, when everything is said and done, and you want to forget everything that happened in these walls, when you're all alone, this picture, this piece of your soul you didn't even know was gone, will haunt you. It will come bearing knives and AKs and nine millimeters, and it will destroy you from the inside out. Put that damned thing down and stop acting like any of this is something worth remembering.”

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”