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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #memo
Brighton Beach does not look, smell, or sound like Russia. It's a parody of Russia at best, something as different from the real thing as a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, they sell Russian food on Brighton Beach, and Russian books and videos, and Russian clothes, and there are Russian restaurants and Russian nightclubs, and everybody speaks Russian, but the Russianness of the place is so concentrated that it feels ridiculously exaggerated. Everything Russian on Brighton Beach is too Russian, far more Russian than in real Russia. This is what happens all over Brooklyn. From the Scandinavians of Bay Ridge to the Chinese of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's immigrants go to ridiculous extremes to re-create their homelands only to end up with a vulgar pastiche. ↗
Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love. ↗
#history #love #memory #nationalism #race
Eventually, you forget it all. First you forget everything you learned - the dates of wars and Pythagorean theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your favorite teachers, and eventually you forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times, and eventually, but slowly, you forget your humiliations - even the ones that seemed indelible, just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not, who went to good college, who threw the best parties, who had the most friends. You forget them all. Even the ones you said you loved, and the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.... ↗
I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations. ↗
That made her pause, almost made her want to laugh. She pushed her hair from her face. "God, we're fucked up, aren't we?" His tight features loosened a little. "Yeah, I've been trying to get over it most of my life. I guess I'd had myself talked into thinking I had." "Me, too. I'm sorry," she told him, her shoulders relaxing. "I didn't need to get so pissed off." He cracked a grin, "You did, though, didn't you? I kind of liked seeing you like that. All that fire. ↗
They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer. ↗
#memory #summertime #love
