With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

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

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.

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.

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

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.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.