Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

Memory changes as a person matures.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.