Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.