Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

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.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

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