Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

I know that what's said is often less important than the tone of voice in which the words are spoken. There is music in dialogue, mysterious harmonies and dissonances that vibrate in the body

Our memories are forever being altered by the present - memory isn't stable, but mutable.

There is no clear border between remembering and imagining.

It's ironic, though, because in my book I try to talk about the way we organize perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. But then, that woman isn't interested in the problem of consciousness and reality. She doesn't give a jot about philosophy. These journalists actually believe they can get the real story, the objective truth, or tell both sides, as if the world is always split in two. At the same time, 'reality' in America has become synonymous with the rank and the sordid. We've fetishized the true story, the tell-all confession, reality TV, real people in their real lives, celebrity marriages, divorces, addictions, humiliation as entertainment - our version of the public hanging. The crowds gathers to gape.

It cannot last, I say, this feeling cannot last, but it doesn't matter. It is here now.

I understood that my friend had whole territories within him I had never known about.

We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being.

We don't experience the world. We experience our expectations of the world.

When we are heavy with emotion, it can be excruciating to speak. We don't want to let the words out, because then they will also belong to other people, and that is a danger we can't risk.