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

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

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

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.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

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