quote · Legacy record
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
Approximate author period: c. 1942 AD · modern
Meaning not yet available
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- Author or tradition
- Isabel Allende
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1942 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1942; activity date not established; Wikidata Q83566, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83566 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 56617; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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