Notebook Quotes

“I continue to stare, my eyes missing nothing, remembering the moments we just shared together. But in all that time she does not look back, and I am haunted by the visions of her struggling with unseen enemies. I sit by the bedside with an aching back and start to cry as I pick up the notebook. Allie does not notice. I understand, for her mind is gone. A couple pages fall to the floor, and I bend over to pick them up. I am tired now, so I sit, alone and apart from my wife. And when the nurses come in they see two people they must comfort. A woman shaking in fear from demons in her mind, and the old man who loves her more deeply than life itself, crying softly in the corner, his face in his hands.”

“You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.”

“There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

“They didn’t agree on much. In fact, they didn’t agree on anything. They fought all the time and challenged each other ever day. But despite their differences, they had one important thing in common. They were crazy about each other.”

“Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")”

“dear me i think i can run miles after miles through my mind by imaginary flyover ,gather all together to write down on my notebook.”

“Describing the relationship between the biblical witnesses and the theologians who come after, the author challenges that the theologian is not to correct the notebooks of the biblical writers like some high school teacher. Instead, our theology is always subject to what THEY say, as we willingly submit our notebooks for their approval.”

“She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.”

“Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper.”

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”