I’ll sit still. Sometimes, if you don’t move, your memory comes back.
-- Narrator

Importance: This opening frames the novel as an inquiry into recollection under pressure, where memory is not a stable archive but a fragile reaction to bodily stillness. The narrator’s attempt to recover his past turns forgetting into an immediate, physical condition rather than an abstract failure. The sentence also hints at the book’s larger question of whether stopping to remember is possible in a world that constantly pushes characters to keep moving.

He had his own theory of film editing. That a cut must always be based on a movement, creating an unbroken flow from the first shot to the last.
-- Narrator

Importance: The quote condenses Pabst’s aesthetic credo into a rule of seamlessness, emphasizing how craft promises coherence and control. By describing editing as an “unbroken flow,” the language suggests that cinema can make discontinuity...