A strange thing happened then. The speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgment was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply speaking her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn't a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get i…

But I hope that in the lives of [the characters], you will find stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart. That's the transaction that c…

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for ev…

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

White Australians were sent to Australia as convicts on great big boats. The scum of the earth, sent to the arsehole of the planet. On the way they must have b…