There used to be days that I thought I was okay, or at least that I was going to be. We’d be hanging out somewhere and everything would just fit right and I would think ‘it will be okay if it can just be like this forever’ but of course nothing can ever stay just how it is forever.
—Nina LaCour in Hold Still
I want a new past, new memories, a new first handshake with love. I want to start over in every possible way.
—Isaac Marion in Warm Bodies
Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you're avoiding them.
—Jodi Picoult in Lone Wolf
The things that go wrong often make the best memories.
—Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project
Some days I imagined getting on a bus and leaving this town behind. The memories weren't good. At least most of them weren't.
—Abbi Glines in Because of Low
Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.
—Nicholas Sparks in The Wedding
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
—Barbara Kingsolver in The Lacuna
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
—Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk
You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible.
—Casey McQuiston in White & Royal Blue