What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves." "But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman. "In a simple order," said the man. "With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude.

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

So much better to travel than to arrive.