“In my defence I can only say that her past, too, like mine, like everyone's in fact, was a locked box. Occasionally we allow people a peep, but generally only at the top level. The darker streams of our memories we negotiate alone.”

“Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use rubble of the old to raise up new ones. Some memories are bright glass, blindingly beautiful when they catch the sun, but then there are the darker days, when they reflect only the crumbling walls of their derelict neighbours. Some memories are buried under years of patient construction; their echoing halls may never again be seen or walked down, but still they are the foundations for everything that stands above them."Glas told me once that that's what people are, mostly: memories, the memories in their own heads, and the memories of them in other people's. And if memories are like a city, and we are our memories, then we are like cities too. I've always taken comfort in that.”

“We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.”

“We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitaable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. ”

“I went to a box room at the top of the house and locked myself in, in order to be alone with my aching miseries.”

“Our past can control today and tomorrow only to the degree we allow it. The past should not be a place where we dwell but a place from which we learn all we can and then move on.”