Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.