"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."

世界是一个舞台，但剧本选角很糟糕。

You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life.

你接近生命的终点——不，不是生命本身，而是其他东西：生命中任何改变的可能性的终结。

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.

我们生活在时间中——它塑造并控制着我们——但我从未觉得自己真正理解它。

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

历史是记忆的不完美与文献的不足相遇时产生的确定性。

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.

我们多久讲述一次自己的人生故事？我们多久调整、修饰、狡猾地删减一次？而且生命越长久，周围能质疑我们叙述的人就越少，提醒我们我们的生活不是我们的生活，仅仅是我们讲述的关于生活的故事。

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

有些事情发生了却没有留下可察觉的痕迹，没有被谈论或记录下来，尽管如果说后续事件漠不关心地继续下去，就好像这些事情从未发生过一样，那是非常错误的。