Quotes from Lies

432 pages

Rating: (139 votes)


“…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.”
― quote from Lies


“We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.”
― quote from Lies


“Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.”
― quote from Lies


“A law of life: at the precise instant when someone tells a truth, that truth is transformed into a story”
― quote from Lies


“I feel as though my life were a film I've seen too many times; it bores me because I know it by heart, and yet I don't understand it.”
― quote from Lies



Popular quotes

“He ragarded her in surprise. This was a different tune from the one he'd expected to hear, certainly a change from the verse she'd sung when he was a boy. Commitment to ones' name, to one's heritage, to that which the sacrifices of others had made possible -- that was the song he used to hear from Aunt Mary.
"Yes, I do," she said, "If I've learned anything by now, it's that some things are too priceless to sacrifice for a name." - Mary and William”
― Leila Meacham, quote from Roses


“All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower


“Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from I Shall Wear Midnight


“This business I'm in is different. It's special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we're that close; somehow there's been an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other's triumphs, and when one of us gets hurt, we all bleed - it's corny, I know, but it's true. I've never experienced anything like this before. It's great. It turns up the heat in life.”
― Johnny Cash, quote from Cash


“Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood


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