Status Updates From Voortschrijdend inzicht

'We live inside time; it surrounds us and holds us; it marks our beginnings and our ends; it dates our favourite moments and our blackest days; we refer to it all the . . . time – well, there you go.'

'Rereading would be a dull and complacent business if it always resulted in a simple confirmation of what you had previously thought. And the pleasure of being proved wrong can be a genuine pleasure.'

'This lexical golden-ageism often joins hands with grammatical prescriptivism – never end a sentence with a preposition, never split an infinitive, and so on – to create many mournful and irritated letters to the newspapers about the decline of language and, with it, civilization.'

'...we may cannibalise someone else's memory, and change not just the endings of the stories of our lives, but also their middles and beginnings. I think that memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind. That's what I believe at the moment anyway. Though in a few years, perhaps I will have changed my mind about it all over again.'