Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

“Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.”

how she can be a thirty-five-year-old orphan when just yesterday she was a nine-year-old in Moon Boots.

A memory: Imogene, maybe six years old, had broken her front

Where do memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them?

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.

Every stone, every stair, is a key to a memory.

“Maybe,” he says, “a place looks different when you know you’re seeing it for the last time.

Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles.

Seeds are both beginnings and ends—they are a plant’s eggshell and its coffin.

Every hour the thought floats to the surface: If we’re all going to end up happy together in Heaven then why does anyone wait?

Emily Dickinson biography when she says, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.