What we remember from childhood we remember forever — permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

Ozick’s line compresses a psychological and moral insight: early experience is not merely remembered but becomes a kind of permanent internal presence—“ghosts” that continue to haunt perception and feeling. The piling up of tactile/visual verbs (“stamped, inked, imprinted”) suggests childhood memory as inscription, like text pressed into the self, aligning with Ozick’s frequent concern with how language, story, and inherited history mark identity. The phrase “eternally seen” implies that such memories are not passive archives; they actively shape what we notice and how we interpret later life. The sentence also carries an ambivalence: permanence can mean grounding and continuity, but “ghosts” hints at the inescapable, sometimes troubling persistence of formative scenes.