The memory of his daughter hurts because he experienced a beautiful thing that has since gone away. Same as with Julia. Same as with all the loss he has ever experienced.

Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.

“What’s more precious than our memories?” he asks. “They define us and form our identities.”

“Not too much of this left in the world,” he says. The moment Helena lifts the glass to her nose and inhales the sweet, spicy perfume of the ancient grapes, her concept of what wine can be is irrevocably altered.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known. —CARSON MCCULLERS

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this—when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missin

“I think I was the first one to realize what

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD