So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.