“For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”

“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”

“Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.”

“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”