“Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.”

“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.”

“Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.”

“Memory changes as a person matures.”

“Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.”

“The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.”

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