You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.