- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.