How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Nothing is the same, I don't know the way any more. (1.29)
Coming back to the region where she grew up, the narrator sees a lot that is familiar… and a lot that is different. For example, the road she used to use to get home is blocked, which leaves her completely at a loss to figure out how to get there on her own.
Quote #2
What I'm remembering are the visits our mother was obliged to pay Madame while our father was visiting Paul. (2.24)
As the narrator moves through her old stomping grounds, memories of her childhood intrude and bleed into her observations. Here, she remembers her mother's awkward encounters with "Madame," Paul's wife, as she's having her own in the present day.
Quote #3
But Madame doesn't mention it, she lifts another cube of sugar from the tray by her side and he intrudes, across from me, a coffee shop, not city but roadside, on the way to or from somewhere, some goal or encounter. (2.42)
As the narrator is sitting there with Madame, suddenly she remembers sitting with some dude in a coffee shop (the time or exact place of this memory is unspecified). This is one of a handful of times the narrator refers to this dude (or rather memories of him) sneaking into her thoughts like a cat burglar. Memory is tricky that way, especially in this novel.
Quote #4
Claude comes back with the beer and I say "Thank you" and glance up at him and his face dissolves and re-forms, he was about eight the last time I was here; he used to peddle worms in rusted tin cans to the fishermen down by the government dock. He's uneasy now, he can tell I recognize him. (3.18)
Here, the narrator describes a kind of a film-like dissolve in her mind, by which Claude's adult face melts into his face as a child, which she suddenly remembers and recognizes. This device creates a sense that memories are floating around everywhere around this place, just waiting to seep into the narrator's consciousness.
Quote #5
It was before I was born but I can remember it as clearly as if I saw it, and perhaps I did see it: I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother's stomach, like a frog in a jar. (3.34)
Apparently even memories that aren't the narrator's can bleed into her consciousness. Although it's (probably?) not literally true that can remember seeing her brother's drowning from inside the womb, the image suggests the power of the past to be retained and remembered.
Quote #6
We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal clear image enclosed by a blank wall. (5.33)
That husband dude is back again, essentially sprinting after the narrator and back into her consciousness. Hmm, we wonder why memories of him would be chasing her. Why would she be running from it?
Quote #7
I have to behave as though it doesn't exist, because for me it can't, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh cancelled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget. (5.44)
The narrator has stated that she and her ex-husband had a baby, but she doesn't appear to be involved with "it"—in fact, she pretends to others (like Anna) that the child doesn't exist.
Quote #8
There's no act I can perform except waiting; tomorrow Evans will ship us to the village, and after that we'll travel to the city and the present tense. (6.1)
This sentence really highlights how much the narrator feels like being home is yanking her back into the past against her will. Before David makes the executive decision that they're all staying longer, she's really looking forward to getting back to the "present tense."
Quote #9
I look around at the walls, the window; it's the same, it hasn't changed, but the shapes are inaccurate as though everything has warped slightly. I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone. I run quickly over my version of it, my life, checking it like an alibi; it fits, it's all there till the time I left. Then static, like a jumped track, for a moment I've lost it, wiped clean; my exact age even, I shut my eyes, what is it? To have the past but not the present, that means you're going senile. (8.36)
Hmm, what now? She's not sure sometimes if her memories are her own? That's a little weird… apparently, she believes that she has the capacity to invent memories or let other people shape what she remembers. This moment should put us a little bit on our guard about believing what she has to tell us.
Quote #10
Ring on my finger. It was all real enough, it was enough reality for ever, I couldn't accept it, that mutilation, ruin I'd made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now. (17.16)
It seems that the narrator wasn't joking about her memories being potentially faulty. Late in the novel, we learn that some of the important details about her past (for example, regarding her ex-husband and child) were pretty inaccurate; she had faked the memories so that they were easier to swallow.