She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

What Chance has made yours is not really yours.

He was the kind of person who needed others to feel his existence.

Our memories tell more about now than then. Doubtless the past is real. There is no shortage of evidence: photos, journals, letters, old suitcases. But we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticize it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalized memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.

The self is a network of impressions that we form about ourselves in the context of our relationships with others.