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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.