“Time laughs in the distance as I cling to the belief memories of you will fade.”
“Without memories,there can be no good or evil. It will exist only indifference!”
“More we remember more is chance to know who we are....”
“DIE WITH MEMORIES, NOT DREAMS”
“The past is only the present become invisible and mute; its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.”
“Places are like smells - they can take you back anywhere.”
“Your memory is… it’s like that song. You knew by heart once. And you will again. It’ll come back even if you don’t know the words right now. You do recognize it. It means you belong here—or we’re close. Wherever home is, we’ll find it.”
“Isn t it odd? Why do we always feel just as guilty when we think of our teachers as when we think of our parents? And not because of anything that happened at school -- no, not at all. It s because of what became of us later.”
“At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”
“Certain memories, certain trains of thought are like the aching tooth one must always be touching just to make sure it still hurts.”
“It was as though each of us—in separate and distinct ways—had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back at unexpected moments... Old ghosts awoke, stirred angrily into life by this girl, like a wasp s nest struck with a stick.”
“The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear. Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be.”
“The picture would remind Oliver of the morning when I first spoke out. Or of the day when we rode by the berm pretending not to notice it. Or of that day we d decided to picnic there and had vowed not to touch each other, the better to enjoy lying in bed together the same afternoon. I wanted him to have the picture before his eyes for all time, his whole life, in front of his desk, of his bed, everywhere. Nail it everywhere you go, I thought.”
“I liked watching them, all three of them around my truck. I wanted time to stop because everything seemed so simple, Dante and Legs falling in love with each other, Dante s mom and dad remembering something about their youth as they examined my truck, and me, the proud owner. I had something of value– even if it was just a truck that brought out a sweet nostalgia in people. It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep that photograph forever.”
“Why is it that happiness remembered feels like despair?”
“For a long minute he gazed at her, his eyes searching the features of that face he d grown to love so deeply over the years, his memory bringing up images of the past as he did so. The young determination in her face as, in the middle of a blazing firefight, she d grabbed Luke s blaster rifle away from him and shot them an escape route into the Death Star s detention-level garbage chute. The sound of her voice in the middle of deadly danger at Jabba s, helping him through the blindness and tremor and disorientation of hibernation sickness. The wiser, more mature determination visible through the pain in her eyes as, lying wounded outside the Endor bunker, she had nevertheless summoned the skill and control to coolly shoot two stormtroopers off Han s back. And he remembered, too, the wrenching realization he d had at that same time: that no matter how much he tried, he would never be able to totally protect her from the dangers and risks of the universe. Because no matter how much he might love her--no matter how much he might give of himself to her--she could never be content with that alone. Her vision extended beyond him, just as it extended beyond herself, to all the beings of the galaxy. And to take that away from her, whether by force or even by persuasion, would be to diminish her soul. And to take away part of what he d fallen in love with in the first place.”
“It s the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us.”