Amy Bloom Quotes

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.

Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.

Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

The memory is like orbiting twin stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor.

It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.

We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.

There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.

Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water”.

Subtract out the impact and the fall is all you get. So here's two beers to remember why and three more to forget.

Memories of ice and Trent surfaced, and I wrapped my arms around my middle. I had saved him, and he had saved me. What was wrong with us?

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrist throbbed with buried memories.

I was forced to enter the basement of my soul and look directly at what was hidden there, and to choose, in the face of it all, not death but life.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

As the stag which the huntsman has hit flies through bush and brake, over stock and stone, thereby exhausting his strength but not expelling the deadly bullet from his body; so does experience show that they who have troubled consciences run from place to place, but carry with them wherever they go their dangerous wounds.

Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

Un-forgiveness is like cancer; it eats you from the inside out.

We've forgotten what it's like not to be able to reach the light switch. We've forgotten a lot of the monsters that seemed to livein our room at night. Nevertheless, those memories are still there, somewhere inside us, and can sometimes be brought to the surface by events, sights, sounds, or smells. Children, though, can never have grown-up feelings until they've been allowed to do the growing.

You're only as sick as your secrets.

What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.

For I need this scar over my heart to remind me. Crazy as it sounds, if I can bear the wound on my body, it lessens what I must carry on my soul. How he knew that about me, I cannot fathom.

If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.