“In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthywere all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abracand mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.”

“(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.”

“I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.”

“Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.”

“Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights...”

“Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.”