Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Memory changes as a person matures.

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