So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other "allies" in it - from India or Australia, etc.

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

Love is the use one makes of another.