Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Memories
-
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
→ -
The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.
→ -
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
→ -
I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
→ -
The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory - there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.
→ -
There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.
→ -
Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
→ -
Vision sometimes comes in a memory.
→
Related Authors
-
Jane Smiley Novelist -
Edward P. Jones Novelist -
Rod Dreher Writer -
Jennifer Egan Novelist -
Lydia Davis Writer -
Colm Toibin Novelist -
Paul Harding Musician -
Margaret Atwood Poet -
Jeb Bush Former Governor of Florida -
John Updike Novelist -
Michael Cunningham Writer -
Joseph O'Neill Novelist -
Hilary Mantel Writer -
Anne Tyler Novelist -
David Foster Wallace Novelist -
Cormac McCarthy Novelist -
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Anthony Doerr Author of novels -
Richard Powers Novelist -
Alice Munro Author