Memory Wall Quotes

“To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbreak like these doesn't.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“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.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren't continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Draw the darkness ... and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another." from "Afterworld.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Where do memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them? It”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. 'You've grown up so fast,' Robert's mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. 'Look at you." But she's wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." from "Village 113”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“It is the rarest thing...that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Don’t tell me how to grieve. Don’t tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don’t, heartbreak like this doesn’t. The axe blade is still as sharp and real inside me as it was six months ago. I”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Maybe...a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full. In”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Frau Rosenbaum describes the November light in Venice, how it simultaneously hardens and softens everything.

“In the evenings that light is like liquid,” she sighs. “You want to drink it.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“A person can get up and leave her life. The world is that big.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. —LUIS BUÑUEL, MY LAST SIGH”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall: Stories

“Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles. She”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“You want to know? What it’s like? To prop up the dam? To keep your fingers plugged in its cracks? To feel like every single breath that passes is another betrayal, another step farther away from what you were and where you were and who you were, another step deeper into the darkness”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“And then I feel the Big Sadness coming on, like there’s a shiny and sharp axe blade buried inside my chest. The only way I can stay alive is to remain absolutely motionless so instead of whispering Dear God how could you do this to me, I only whisper Amen”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“Every second, walking those two hundred meters, is like leaping into very cold water, in that first instant when the body goes into shock, and everything you are, everything you call your life, disintegrates for an instant, and all you have around you is the water and the cold, your heart trying to send splinters through a block of ice.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“We all go back to the mud. Until we rise again in ribbons of light.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall