Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.