“Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]”
― The Sense of an Ending
― The Sense of an Ending
“For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.”
― Mrs. Dalloway
― Mrs. Dalloway
“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
― The Sense of an Ending
― The Sense of an Ending
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― The Sense of an Ending
― The Sense of an Ending
“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
― The Sense of an Ending
― The Sense of an Ending
Loes’s 2025 Year in Books
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