Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.