I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?