“The name of the author is the first to gofollowed obediently by the title, the plot,the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novelwhich suddenly becomes one you have never read,never even heard of,as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbordecided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,to a little fishing village where there are no phones.Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbyeand watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.It has floated away down a dark mythological riverwhose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,well on your own way to oblivion where you will join thosewho have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.No wonder you rise in the middle of the nightto look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.No wonder the moon in the window seems to have driftedout of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”

“Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power, even human ones. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.”

“...here we have the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. On the other hand, sometimes you wish to remember something, and there it stands at the doorway of your consciousness, and refuses to come in. You know you know something, the name of some useless celebrity, perhaps, and yet you cannot fish that name out of your inner aquarium. And this illustrates a critical feature of memory, which resembles, as it turns out, most of the processes in the internal realm: the same cause will regularly yield different, even opposite effects.”

“You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.”

“If you're not reading - with your heart as well as your brain - you will be one stupid grown up. Even worst, you'll be missing out on one of the best experiences you can possibly have. Nowhere will you meet more interesting people than in books.”

“Traveling at night toward the stars, I thought yet again how very far away they were, and how you could travel your whole lifetime and never reach even the closest one. But even if you knew you couldn’t have something, it didn’t stop you wanting it. I wondered if Kate was to be my star, and I’d spend my life gazing upon her but never reaching her.”