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

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

I've often thought that none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Secrets can define people.

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.

I remember looking at my father lying there, without himself. My dead father was a stranger.

His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense.

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

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.

It can't be accidental that we bring back dead people we've known and loved in our dreams. Surely that's a form of wishing.

We make our narratives, and those created stories can't be separated from the culture in which we live.

Trauma doesn't appear in words, but in a roar of terror, sometimes with images. Words create the anatomy of a story, but within each story there are openings that can't be closed.

There is no clear border between remembering and imagining.

Real meaning, true insight is rarely dry. It's almost always accompanied by emotion.

Trauma isn't part of a story; it's outside story. It is what we refuse to make part of our story.

History is made by amnesia.

I found it incomprehensible, and yet those months are blurry now. I see bits, not wholes [...] all saturated with general misery. It's as if my sadness soaked the architecture. I can tell you a story about it, and I wouldn't be lying, but would that reconstruction of events be real or true?

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.

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.