Palimpsest Quotes

“The journey through another world, beyond bad dreams
beyond the memories of a murdered generation,
cartographed in captivity by bare survivors
makes sacristans of us all.

The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.
Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of
kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymns
upon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voice
transforms the ways of song to words of poetry or prose
and makes distinctions
no one recognizes.
Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscans
on the edge of useless law; we pray
to the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistle
in ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chain
of incense burners. Migration makes
new citizens of Rome.”
― Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

“Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated.”
― Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings

“The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Qu’est-ce que le cerveau humain, sinon un palimpseste immense et naturel?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels, Opium Et Haschisch

“They want only their private toys and candies, and will not share.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“Every act of reading is an act of forgetting: the experience of reading is a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers those that came before. Those books that allow us to forget the most are accorded he authority of the classic.”
― James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

“How bizarre to be here once again. The scene conjures itself before me like a terrible magic trick, a palimpsest. There had been fewer cars. The lot wasn't paved then. The supermarket had been smaller, less modern, and named something else. But the general angles, the spatial arrangements, the site at the top of the hill: yes. Déjà vu ripples through me like a bad lunch beginning to announce itself hours before the final disaster. My stomach twists, and I feel an unease settle. I never thought I would return. I told myself I never would.”
― Katie Lattari, Dark Things I Adore