The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

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

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

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.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.