“I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. And yes, I suppose I was interested in that story in the gap between memory itself, the real business of being alive, and the imagination.”

“I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.”

“I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much for reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.”

“With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap - that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening.”

“Meaning, yes -- I don't really exist except on the page or in the back of your brain. But if you think it's weird a fictional character's telling this story, you ain't seen what happened, yet.”

“If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.”