All of it was there but nothing had substance. It was as if they were all shadows, as if her leaving had taken the life out of the living things and left them shadows. he...

I didn’t know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.

She recognized that this city was a place that granted you only what you were willing to claim

Everybody, he mused had everything worked out. Except me

As a teacher, his task was not to make policy but to follow the policy made by the Department.

Alford was going to start this fast the same way he had started everything else, alone and uncertain

the sun had tanned her so that the rich velvety blackness of her skin glistened and she felt so much herself on those days of Carnival, soaked so deeply with a sense of her own...

then suddenly one day he awake to find that time had gone; the house completed, the imortelle tree cut down, his mother dead.