“Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past. ”

“What is past, one cannot change,so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away.”

“We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.”

“She would say that what is past, one cannot change, so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away.”

“I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.”

“The present doesn’t change the past. Is the fact that the past happened enough to make the present good? Is the past real? Was it real anymore?”