Palimpsest Quotes

• Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

  George Orwell

  Party, Past, Expression

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.140, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

  Russell Hoban

  History, Effort, Language

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• What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

  Natasha Trethewey

  Memories, Bleeding, Left

  Natasha Trethewey (2012). “Thrall: Poems”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.

  Teju Cole

  Cities, Site, Written

  Teju Cole (2011). “Open City: A Novel”, p.68, Random House

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• The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

  Pat Barker

  Memories, Past, Accumulation

  Pat Barker (1996). “The Regeneration Trilogy”, Gardners Books

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• Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Reading, Book, Eye

  Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.89, Random House

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• Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

  Gore Vidal

  Memories, Character, Mean

  "The End of Gore Vidal". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2012.

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• I will write in words of fire. I will write them on your skin. I will write about desire. Write beginnings, write of sin. You’re the book I love the best, your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dream, Drama, Book

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• In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Spring, Struggle, Winter

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Child of God”, p.138, Vintage

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• Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.

  A.C. Grayling

  Wall, Graffiti, Looks

  A. C. Grayling (2009). “Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values”, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Prayer, Philosophy, Book

  "New American Haggadah". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2012.

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• People who live in quiet, remote places are apt to give good dinners. They are the oft-recurring excitement of an otherwise unemotional, dull existence. They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the others.

  M. E. W. Sherwood

  Memories, People, Giving

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