“These were the kind [of letters] you save, folded into a memory box, to be opened years later with fingers against crackling age, heart pounding with the sick desire to be possessed by memory.”

“There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for later years than some good memory, especially a menory connected with childhood, with home. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if we have only one good memory left in our hearts..even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

“Your memories don't possess you, you possess your memories.”

“Her memories were beads jumbled loose in a box, unstrung.”

“You didn't bury bodies and dig them up years later. It was best to take the same approach with memories”

“You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”