Monique’s Reviews > The Marriage of True Minds > Status Update

When we read a book, our minds, our minds assemble the words and spaces and punctuation into a text, and our imagination assembles bits of text into a character. In life our minds assemble the elements of experience (words, looks, touches, actions) into memories, and from those memories our imagination constructs a persona. Even those we love exist only in our imagination. Only. Only...

"It was a mutual decision. No, it was more like mutually assured destruction."

We don't really know who we are as much as we remember ourselves. Our stream of consciousness flows into an ocean of memory and by this memory, this correlated continuous database of personality and happenstance, we awake each day to reconstruct ourselves in the real world.

Real is trickier than people realize.

A person is never the same as he or she was the day before, either physically or psychologically.

On this island, there is no time. No day. No night. No past. No future. There isn't even any Now. There is only Always. If you are ever here, you are always here.

"Violence begins when imagination fails... It's the eternal paradox. Love is annoyment."

"Did you know that sunset is sunrise backward?" he asked.
They both stared out at the softening light.
"And memory is imagination in reverse," he said.

"Every relationship requires some sacrifice."
"Not usually human."

"Separately we can do good things. Together we can do great things. We have an obligation to our own wonderfulness."