What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.

They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.

It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.