the old-fashioned eagle-scout-type young man-woman bakes some kind of mail-order pies for a living with different roommates, you can smell the smell of the pies mixing with the chemistry-class rotten-egg smell from the hairdressers' permanent waves

A while ago
The Japanese lady who lives next door smiled
When Marie smelled the fragrance of her cultivated rose

Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest.

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