Lips Touch: Three Times Memory and the Past Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Story.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #1

All of the omens of the day, the swirl of swan feathers, the grave of dead grass, her grandmother's blade still rimed with the frost of the underworld, all her memories of warnings, they coalesced into a simple understanding: Deep in her veins ran the admonition never to eat fruit out of season. (1.3.71)

Even if Kizzy's never experienced any supernatural dangers in her own life, she carries her family's experiences with her. And all of those collective memories are making her Spidey-sense tingle here: Something nefarious is afoot.

Quote #2

The wicked in this part of the world endured rueful decades of early death, and the Fire burned hot and bright and remade them all, and they were all in their turn born back into the world as carp and macaques and salamanders and mosquitoes with no recollection of their human lives of the Fire that followed, but only faint memories of music, like wisps of a dream, from their last glimmering moments in Hell. (2.12.7)

When souls die and end up in Hell, they're just repurposed and put into new bodies with only the hint of a memory about where they came from and how they were forged. Estella is down for that kind of forgetting, though, especially after a lifetime of pain and loneliness.

Quote #3

Esmé's blood quickened as a shock of memories pulsed through her; a world of snow and spires; a milky mirror framed in jewels; the touch of warm lips on hers.

Esmé swayed on her feet. These weren't her memories. (3.P.3-4)

What's going on with Esmé's memories? It's bad enough waking up with one blue eye, but now she has to contend with all of these strange memories that don't belong to her.