She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art–she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the street outside–a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. Alan Hollinghurst
About This Quote

This paragraph is about the vivid memory of a book that the speaker has read that she has no recollection of reading. She is reflecting on how much time it would take to read all those books and whether or not she simply didn't remember them. The speaker seems to think that, as she can't remember all those books, it is pointless to say she had ever read them. However, this isn't always the case. Sometimes we can remember what we read even though we don't recall reading it.

Source: The Strangers Child

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  1. She kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
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