“This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.”

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”

“I remember, in no particular order: - a shiny inner wrist; - steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; - gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house; - a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; - another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface; - bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”

“You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”

“Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”

“Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]”

“And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.”