Mem Quotes

“Why is memory this way? Why isn’t it content to hurt you once? Why must it remind you of all the times you’ve been hurt before?”
― Bethany C. Morrow, MEM

“What kind of people are we if we can’t traverse the landscape of our own memories? What kind of people do they become who refuse?”
― Bethany C. Morrow, MEM

“Mems were something akin to shells, keepsake boxes housing memories sometimes precious but often despised.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“She was a Mem [...] trapped in a single moment, [...] every other memory were, quite literally, single-minded, replaying themselves every minute of every hour of the day and then watching their origins at night.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“I am a memory. Now I suppose I'll live like one.”
― Bethany C. Morrow, Mem

“I couldn’t decide whether to laugh. It was one of those strange remarks offered in jest that nevertheless displays all the hallmarks of honesty.”
― Bethany C. Morrow, MEM

“...his occasional revelations [...] informed my understanding of the world and the people in it. [...] I was part of the charade now, no longer an innocent caught between two worlds. [...] I'd become defender of the illusion. Curator of a false history.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“The world, its fragility and the brief nature of its favor [...] had been extracted with Dolores's memory. [...] The extraction abandoned Dolores to be just as she had been before, unprepared to cope with the subsequent traumas, which her father would therefore continue to extract.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“But a sea of memory, feeling, and thought could not be reduced to a few words, not well.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“It meant the truth was inside of me now; it swam beneath my skin, a calm and calming victory for an audience of one. It was for me and only so many as I decided to tell.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“Every breath was even, but more than that. It was easy, like the contentment of revealing a winning hand. [...] But there it was, the tiles arranged together in a kind of order that meant triumph, that meant I'd made sense of fate and happenstance.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“And then a flood of overstimulation, an untranslatable reckoning of our exactness and our separation. An ache because we were one. A flurry of excitement because we were not.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“You can't lose me," I whispered. "I'll always be your girl. Even if you're the only one to see me that way."
As much as I hoped breaking with the fantasy of humanness would simplify my life, I couldn't help the way they stayed on my mind, these parents who had chosen me, the Professor and Camille, and Ettie, my last and closest friend.
And Harvey.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“I cannot lose another child."
It was the loveliest thing ever said to or about me and it broke my heart in an entirely new way. I'd become as vain as any of the other Mems; despite what I knew about him, I'd forgotten that not every real person had chosen the path of relief.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“It was easy to forget how much you cared, but I shouldn't have. You've been fighting in a way I'm not allowed and it means the world to me.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“I don't agree with the practice of extraction. That's the truth. What kind of people are we if we can't traverse the landscape of ur own memories? What kind of people do they become who refuse?”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“I'd never been a Dolores to him, never just another extraction of my Source [...] Harvey Parrish had seen me.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“In the month since my recall, Harvey Parrish had proven incapable of dramatic pantomiming--but not devoid of love. He was a scientist and his affection had been shown in the solving of a complicated dilemma, imperfect as the solution might be. He would not rest until it succeeded.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“real life was fragile, and this fragility was born of chaos.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“Memory could weave thousands of those threads together, and in what became my most intriguing discovery, memory often employed the senses to accomplish it. Textures, sounds, smells could all be time machines, sending a person back through life to discover moments that complemented or matched the present. The phenomenon not only captivated my scientific interest, but also restored a measure of my freedom, transporting me outside the facility.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“It is possible to be killed by the most prized of possessions, to be destroyed by the greatest invention of our time. It is possible to die in the street no matter how you began the day. This is the first universal truth I have ever come by on my own and it multiplies like fire.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“If people are imperfect enough to destroy their minds, perhaps they cannot perfect the procedure that allows them to do so.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“Mems, after all, did not respond to their environments. [...] It was clear that they perceived those surroundings as aspects of the memories they housed, not as they truly were.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“No one seemed to expect how uncomfortable I felt, now that I was not alone in the dormitory, now that there was a memory constantly present, and one I knew well.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“What a Mem is meant to be [was to have] something missing from her eyes, some light or focus, so that even when she was looking at someone it was clear they weren't the true object of her gaze. [...] That was one of two ways in which Mems before me amused society, by having routines imprinted on them despite being otherwise disengaged and unaware of the world around them. The other was the way they could be prompted to recall the memories they housed.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“She is something new. She. And elsewhere, here. Never it. I wiped the tear from my cheek and closed my eyes for a moment to recall the way my first Banker's awe had slowly blossomed into a smile.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“The restriction was shortsighted. It focused on safeguarding people from the damage we believed was most a threat when extracting the Mem container, which is something like the memory, and the afterbirth, and maybe even a piece of the mechanism that conceives.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“The science of extraction had been developed to help people heal from painful memories.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“The walls were tightening around me by the moment and I was in the Vault, for any number of bureaucratic reasons, but only one that mattered: because I was not real.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem

“I'd been careful not to appear interested. [...] Blending into the background so as to avoid notice. A strategy [...] that serves real people as well as it serves Mems.”
― Bethany C Morrow, Mem