It was just enough to sit there without words.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.

It was just enough to sit there without words.

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.