There’s no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that’s that.

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying...

that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note.

Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.