866 quotes found
“this is the problem with photographs. After a while, you cant remember if youre recalling the actual memory or the memory of the photograph. Or perhaps the photograph is the only reason you remembe...”
“I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how b...”
“We have to watch Nana's life slipping away from her like a forgotten word. I thought I understood what's happening to her, but this isn't like being robbed a penny at a time. Memories aren't curren...”
“The magnitude of any one day is compromised by its passing quickly into the next, a mere moment in time which soon fades into the collective memory of our past.”
“I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up e...”
“What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someones memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memorie...”
“He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But ...”
“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”
“But with her eyes closed, she began to whisper. If you have someone to love, then love. If you have someone to forgive, then forgive. You think, when youre seventeen, theres time enough for that, b...”
“Like the long gone captains of the Confederacy, he stood watch at the edge of Dauphin Island, his old life just out of sight across the water. What he felt in those moments, pelicans skimming the c...”
“I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy,...”
“Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be v...”
“Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite par...”
“Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.”
“Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died.”
“I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)”
“But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.”
“She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to prot...”
“Im not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connectedor that no one can outrun destinyor that all roads lead to truth and coincidence ...”
“For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully u...”
