Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and...

I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only...

I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven.

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth,...

I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They...

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was...

…be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch something; don’t throw...

At the top of the page I wrote my full name […] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: “I wish I could love someone...

this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this...

In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them,...

What I don’t write is as important as what I write.

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don’t like at all and would like to avoid. It’s not as if the whole thing has not...

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

[Unhappiness] comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you’re born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that’s really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and...

It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.

I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of...

This is how you bully a man; this is how an man bullies you.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time...

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away–your beauty would go away, and there...

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card – the kind that has a satin ribbon on...

That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn’t want to love one more thing that...