Shane McCrae > Quotes

“Your relationship with yourself is retrospective in a way—in many ways, surely—your relationships with others cannot be.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“When she told me why she was divorcing my grandfather, I was surprised - all my life, I had thought he could do anything he wanted. But after a few long moments of silence, I realized: he had only ever done anything he wanted to me.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“Who are you if you erase your life whenever you recall your life?”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“My grandmother had watched my grandfather kill me since I was three.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“Lately, and more so each day, memory seems a spell I cast on myself—some details I can check without breaking the spell, like whether I know suitable wording for the incantation, and others I can’t check, like whether magic is real. If I check what Five Oaks looked like, I might stop seeing it in my memory; what little I still remember might vanish—if I want to keep my memories, I can’t be sure I remember them correctly. The same is true for most people, I think, a version of the same phenomenon, though hopefully for most people the experience of it is less extreme. But maybe the experience is just as extreme, even more extreme, for other people who have suppressed their most painful memories. But also the mind seems to develop a taste for eating memories, and bites holes into those it doesn’t swallow whole—I’ve felt the correction of a memory via photographic evidence, for example, and more than once I’ve felt this not as a moment of satisfaction, but as a moment of sudden hunger.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“When I try to imagine the addresses of the houses and apartments I lived in before my grandparents kidnapped me, I can’t remember anything, of course I can’t remember anything, I was three when I was kidnapped, but instead of a blank where the addresses should be, or even a vague image of a house, many images of houses appear and disappear in my mind, one house after another, maybe ten houses, in a loop in which the order of the images changes as the images recur. No house from before I was kidnapped to go back to, but the mind wants a house.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“A thing you can witness that ought to be instructive, but not a lesson you can learn, not a mistake you can avoid making yourself: by the time you realize you’ve left your life behind it’s too late to return to your life.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

“No one else can betray you the way you can betray you. But for most people it’s a certainty—no one else will betray you the way you will betray you.”
― Shane McCrae, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping