People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember readi...
She was not willing to let others narrate her life and her death. While there is one person like her in this world, I will find myself defending both her right to struggle and our obligation to remember.
Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one h...
All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it's dead and gone, someone's left behind to remember it. Exactly like people.
Slowly, all the days became Saturdays, full of more sunlight than I could remember seeing in a long time.
At a time when she was engaged to Stilton Cheesewright, I remember recording in the archives that she was tall and willowy with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum blond-hair, the sort of girl who might, as far as looks were concerned, have bee...
I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.
I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order.
You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.
Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it fee...
We had a teacher called Fanny Menlove, and I remember once when she was out of the room Nancy went up to the blackboard and wrote it backward - Menlove Fanny - and we all fell around laughing. She got into big trouble, but she didn't seem to mind. Sh...
It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is an...
Has he been with a woman yet?” he asked remembering the girl at the barn. She shot him an angry glance.“Is that all you think about? Of course he hasn’t.He is only eleven.” “Nothing wrong with a boy starting early. I did.” “And look how...
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a c...
Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not...
Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow; drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine. Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky: by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou.
Okay, you must have forgotten that I know when someone's lying-it's one of my special, freaky priestess gifts, remember-the one you love to use until it becomes inconvenient for you? You can try to throw me off, but even half truths ring false with m...
Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a foreca...
You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.
I looked into Blake's eyes, remembering my lost marble and thinking that even though it was gone forever, there could be another match out there. There might be another guy who would kiss my forehead, a guy who was just as sweet as strong enough to c...
We made love like two kangaroos arguing over the cargo capacity of a purse on sale. But I said, “No—it’s less money, yes, but it’s also less space than we need.” Whatever we do when we do it, we must remember that we do it for the children.