Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet