He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.