She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.

It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

The idea that we've outgrown ends up limiting us and we have to make a choice about what we're going to do in our lives.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignnes of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less.