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

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

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

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.

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