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.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

There's always some hope in anger, I think, hope for things to be different

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old word.s

It's obvious that there are stories that can't be told without pain to others or to oneself, that autobiography is fraught with questions of perspective, self-knowledge, repression, and outright delusion.

I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it's better when they speak than when they don't. After my father died, I couldn't talk to him in person anymore, but I didn't stop having conversations with him in my head. I didn't stop seeing him in my dreams or stop hearing his words.

I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.

Grief seized me so suddenly I thought I might black out.

For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me

But maybe every day we let grief in, we'll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we'll be able to breathe again.

So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?

I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else's story.

My heart feels heavy in my chest. Secrets carry weight, like lead.

We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world, bound in leather

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

Love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done.

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.