And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.

I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.