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

“been given brought us success and happiness? Some of my sisters were still very young and hadn’t”
― Lucinda Riley, quote from The Seven Sisters


“Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems”—which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do. The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem ever disappears forever. Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse ones. The reappearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to find “the right way to solve it.” To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you. A temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be “cured.” The way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the CHEMCAL metaphor. We see this as a clear case of the power of metaphor to create a reality rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality.”
― George Lakoff, quote from Metaphors We Live By


“It is central to Christian living that we should celebrate the goodness of creation, ponder its present brokenness, and, insofar as we can, celebrate in advance the healing of the world, the new creation itself. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, and many other expressions of human delight and wisdom, can all be explored in new ways.”
― N.T. Wright, quote from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense


“It's just after three o'clock when we hit County Road 50. The temperature has swelled past ninety and the sun scorches our backs as we swerve our bikes around pools of bubbling tar.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Brutal Telling


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