Quotes from In a Strange Room

“If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“In his clearest moments he thinks he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“As a result, he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“Forgive me my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“Something in him has changed, he can't seem to connect properly with the world. He feels this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in himself, he would like to change it but doesn't know how. In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“...if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there's only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of life.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“On that lonely road they looked like mirror images of each other. Perhaps each of them thought of real communication as unnecessary, words divide by multiplying, what was certain was the oneness underneath the words. But now they refrain from talking because it might reveal to them how dangerously unlike one another they are. An image in a mirror is a reversal, the reflection and the original are joined but might cancel each other out.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“They are being driven by a psychopathic Indian apparently bent on killing them all, overtaking on blind rises, racing some other bus to settle an old score, hurtling into corners without slowing down.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. The words come to him from a long way off.”
― Damon Galgut, quote from In a Strange Room

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Popular quotes

“her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children’s story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built....”
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“There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and let them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and do not even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt facades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples—the branches’ misty snake-shapes as inflexibly fixed in these two windows as the leading of stained glass—they will not hold back her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them within herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six years to begin to believe that.”
― John Updike, quote from Rabbit Redux

“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We'd just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. 'Next time I will,' he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, 'Now he'll always be thirsty.' Even now, in my dreams, he's still searching for water.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“I'll talk to Mortimer and see what he thinks, and then get back to you tomorrow. In the meantime, you should really get to sleep and get those shared dreams going."
Cale grimaced at the suggestion, and reminded him, "She has a splitting headache, Bricker."
"I thought that was a married woman's complaint?" Bricker responded quickly, and then laughed at his own joke as he hung up.”
― Lynsay Sands, quote from Hungry for You

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