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The Clockmaker's Daughter

Kate Morton

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favoured memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and polished for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved below ground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.”

“People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.”

“I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable”

“She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother's song.”

“There are very few certainties in this world, Mr. Gilbert, but I will tell you something I know: the truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.”

“Being a parent’s a breeze,” came Alan’s cheerful voice on the wind. “No more difficult than flying a plane with a blindfold on and holes in your wings.”

“There was no going back. Time only moved in one direction. And it didn't stop. It never stopped moving, not even to let a person think. The only way back was in one's memories.”

“Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.”

“The camera is ubiquitous. They all carry one now. Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.”

“We are traveling each towards his sunset.”

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Book Keywords:

heartbeat, mothers, music, parenting, pregnancy

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