People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f

whatever the outcome of cultural conventions and conditioning may be, if we take the sense of self that is implicit in them to be an absolute and immortal truth, oblivious to the cultural contexts that give it substance and significance, we are likely to become as confused as we would be if we aspired to meet a fictional character from a film in th

For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.