She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

People talking about politics usually start from the ass end backwards in that they think you have a political agenda, and then you make your work fit that cookie cutter. It's the other way around. One works by simple observation, looking into things. It's usually called insight and out of that comes your view - not that you have the view first and then squash everything to make it fit. I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.