“How great it would be if our bad memories could be stored in our skin rather than our brains, and we could lather than up, scrubbing incessantly until they sloughed off the surface, gathering at the drain of the tun, completely washed away.”

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.”

“If we could see the fullness of our tomorrows, how many of us would take desperate action to change the future? What if our far seeing showed us the loss of our homes, our families, our very lives, and to save it all we would need only to barter away our most precious souls. Who among us would give up what we cannot see for what we can hold in our hands? I believe many of us would peel ourselves away from our immortal selves as easily as the skin from a boiled plum if it meant we could remain on the earth for a while, our bellies full and our beds warm and safe at night. (214)”

“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library”

“Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we've supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they've also changed how we think and how we use our brains.”

“We humans are different--our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.”