“Memorial was so functional. It was a storage facility. A prematorium.”

“Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.”

“She'd seen it with Isabelle, the way things could become so permeated with memories that story was more important than function.”

“Even with the high-tech air filtration system in a modern facility, the place still smelled like archival storage: old paper, stale manila folders, cardboard, and dust. Libraries and accountants' basements all over the world smelled like this. It was the scent of information waiting to be discovered.”

“I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget.”

“He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function is to leave just a trace in memory.”