24 quotes found
“Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.”
“So now we are young still but a better sort of young.”
“We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.”
“The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.”
“It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.”
“I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.”
“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum in...”
“I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine a romanticized story full of clich images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enoug...”
“Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have ther...”
“But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we...”
“The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me...”
“The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.”
“Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.”
“I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is ...”
“The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.”
“Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.”
“I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been eno...”
