I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

Not real can tell us about real.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

I doubt that Canada will be seen forever on the international stage as Mr/s Boring Niceperson, as has been the habit.

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.