you often don't know until after the fact what you should remember, and by then you're stuck with the things you would rather have forgotten

"You've got your memories," she said. I do? I thought, worried. I couldn't think of any memories.

in the past, everything is immaculately arranged. All things have the same value: people, books, events, chairs, numbers, me, love, New York are of equal value.

...she loved to read, and she took good notes on what she read, on the ideas that came to her from what she read, since she did have some ideas of her own, and even on her ideas about these ideas.

[poetry] is like a face which one seems to be able to visualize clearly in the eye of memory, but when one examines it mentally or tries to think it out, feature by feature, it seems to fade

In order to know who we are [...] we must observe what we see around us and label it correctly; we must be able to [tell memories] apart from our imagination

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

autobiographical memories are not precise reflections of reality; they are stories we tell to convey our personal take on our experience