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

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

“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]”

“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?”

“When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”