A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

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?

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

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.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.

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