You are doing something over here and over there someone is telling you a joke, or giving you an important piece of information about sanitation, and no matter how weird the other subject is, there is a connection, or you can make a connection. I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

Sadness is very close to hate.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.