“That’s another enigma about memory, more basic than all the rest: do recollections have some measurable temporal volume? do they unfold over a span of time? […] And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a moment the way we reread a book or resee a film.”

“And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.”

“We do not remember days, Shemei, we remember moments, and the richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.”

“When we talk about books…we are talking about our approximate recollections of books… What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion…We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. … What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.”

“[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.”

“Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.”