“Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there's no one left to tell those stories? To hear them? Who will ever know that I existed?”

Carrie Ryan

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“We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist … it’s having people remember who we are. We’re terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on.”


“I remember my mother telling me earlier that we are nothing more than our stories. I look at the masses of dead flesh, at all the stories that are now forever silenced.”


“Did you know that when we were kids Cass used to tell me your stories? She used to laugh at you. Not in a mean way, but in the way that Cass used to laugh at everything before...." He gestures around us at our world now. I shake my head. "I thought Cass never liked my stories. Never remembered them." "Oh yes, I would beg her to tell me if she had new stories from you." "Why didn't you ask me yourself?" I whisper. "Because you were Harry's," he responds. "Not always." "Yes, always," he says. "Always in his eyes," he adds in a softer tone.”


“We are our own memory-keepers and we have failed ourselves. It is like that game we played in school as children. Sitting in a circle, one student whispers a phrase into another student’s ear and the phrase is passed around until the last student in the circle repeats what she hears, only to find out it is nothing like what it is supposed to be.This is our life now.”


“The earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothingness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything- all of us will simply cease to be. They'll find peace only when we're all dead.”


“There's one detail I've always remembered: He told me how long it takes the light from the stars to reach through space to us.How most of the points of light we see actually no longer exist. We're just seeing the remnants of what was-- ghosts of what use to be.”