“How we remember changes how we have lived.Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.”

“Some people create war and misery, some create wealth and money, and some create ideas and art. But we all create our own deaths, fashioned out of our lives. Nobody will remember how you died, if nobody remembers how you lived. Forgoing freak accidents, we all choose how we die by how we live. Suicide, old age, AIDS, Cirrhosis of the liver, our deaths tell of how we lived. And even in a freak accident, if we are worth remembering, our lives will overshadow our deaths. If Henry Ford had gotten run over by a Mercedes, people would still remember him as the driver of the hit and run that changed history with his automobile assembly lines.”

“We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist … it’s having people remember who we are. We’re terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on.”

“Remember that it is not enough to have everything around you beautiful, remember that there must also be change and flux, because it is through change that we pretend that we can make decisions, and keep our pride, and go on pretending that both change and choice exist.”

“We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.”

“We have to believe it enough that it changes how we live.”