For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.