“...yesterday, returning from Wawela I had some ethnological ideas, but I can't remember what they were.”

“I had been brought up to be something of an intellectual, but there seemed at the time no connection between my newly formed ideas and the world to which I had returned. Indeed, I did not even recognize my ideas as ideas at all: they seemed to be culled from somewhere else and did not belong to me. I did not know then what I am just beginning to know now: that my ideas were indeed mine, that I had reacted and changed and moved, that I had already analyzed and synthesized, rejecting some thoughts, adopting others, putting yet others away for a while to be thought on. I did not recognize how mentally active an individual I had become, already divorced from the world through my own thoughts, my own perceptions of right and wrong, of honour and justice, of what mattered and what did not. (2007: 117)”

“I could remember the details as if it had happened yesterday, even though it was hard to believe some of it had happened at all. Funerals were tricky like that. And life, I guess. The important parts you blocked out altogether, but the random, slanted moments haunted you, replaying over and over in your mind.”

“I try to remember where I was and what I was doing before I met you, what had been important to me then--and I can't. It's as if I'd been living some other person's life and now all I know is you.”

“But waiting is killing me. Don't they understand? Don't they remember what it feels like? I want to have things settled. I can't stand the idea of not knowing.”

“Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.”