She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.

You'd never killed anyone. Then you had.

How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?

We must be what we are, or we become our enemies.

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.