“Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves.”

“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”

“The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.”

“A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”

“Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”

“The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.”

“Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the shaping of imagination.”

“Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.”

“I find the English amazing how they got over 7/7. There were no multiple memorials with people sobbing as they would have been in America (9/11 attacks). There, they are constantly scaring people but at the same time, people think nothing of going to see a therapist.”

“Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.”