I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.

We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.