People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.