You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

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

There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.