If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorised, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.
Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. (via ourcatastrophe)
(NOTE TO SELF: READ THIS BOOK)