What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.