Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

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

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.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

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