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.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.