“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?”

“In the game of life, we must play what is dealt to us, and the glory consists, not so much in winning, but in playing a poor hand well.”

“We overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

“The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing — the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”

“Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”