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

“Language is power that gets abused all the time, Robin, but we've got real enemies out there somewhere and until they're out of the picture, I won't get knotted up over people who don't get all the words right. It's a waste of energy.”

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.”

“Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced to spearpoint into the present tense." - Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)”

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.”

“What I really devoured . . . was the truculence of my hosts' language: the syntax may have been brutally sloppy, but it was oh so warm in its juvenile authenticity. I feasted on their words, yes, the words flowing at that get-together of country brothers, the sort of words that, at times, delight one much more than the pleasures of the flesh. Words: repositories for singular realities which they transform into moments in an anthology, magicians that change the face of reality by adorning it with the right to become memorable, to be placed in a library of memories. Life exists only by virtue of the osmosis of words and facts, where the former encase the latter in ceremonial dress.”