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

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

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