"Whatever difference there may appear to be in men's fortunes, there is still a certain compensation of good and ill in all, that makes them equal."

Pierre Charron (1601)

"And then - and perhaps this is the worst deceiver of all - we make-up our pasts. You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment and then spinning a tale out of it "

Doris Lessing, from Under My Skin (1995)

"A biographer must never claim knowledge of that which he does not know. Whereof we cannot know, thereof must we be silent."

A.S. Bayatt, from The Biographer's Tale (2000)

"Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues."

Elizabeth Alexander, from "Praise Song for the Day", Barack Obama Inaugural Poem (January 20, 2009)

"Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it"

Gabriel García Márquez, from Living to Tell the Tale (2003)

"In recalling very early memories, if one claims to retain an exact or even approximate recollection of what anyone said so long ago would be to commit the memoirist's great sin."

Michael Chabon, from Moonglow (2016)