For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

What is a secret wish?" "It is what you want but cannot ask.

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.