The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.