“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”

“That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.”

“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”

“All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there.”

“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”

“We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.”

“The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.”