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

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

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.

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

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 truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.