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It was tiring, all that smiling and sharing and speculating about the weather, and she always left a gathering, no matter how intimate, feeling depleted, as if she’d accidentally left behind some vital layers of herself she’d never get back.
Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.
It is different on this side. Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favored memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved belowground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.
“Each clock is unique,” he used to tell me. “And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals.”
life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.”
I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.”
one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”
“There are very few certainties in this world, Mr. Gilbert, but I will tell you something I know: the truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.”
Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.
Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, “See what you can make out of these.”
