Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

Correlation is not cause, it is just a ‘music of chance’.

I’ve come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we’re awake....

Ture stories can’t be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

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

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

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

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

…the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.

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...

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

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

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

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...

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can’t wash it off.

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don’t wear but simply have – the ones given them by nature….. [S]he pointed...

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone’s eye, we look into a mind.

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn’t bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and...

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary...

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here...

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I’ve always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We’re fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

True stories can’t be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist’s] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves...

The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she...

He was one of those people in New York who was purported to “know everybody”. “Knowing everybody” is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people...

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

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Outside, in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, ‘It’s so bitter.”What, Mama?”Old age.’ [p. 187]

I don’t want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order...

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there...

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives...

Memory changes as a person matures.

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

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.

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

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