He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.

In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture-it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.