What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

They can send death at once, but life is slower.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.