To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

History works itself out in the living.

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.