I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that...

We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present – do we not?

Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it...

One has no room for vengeance,’ says Shara, ‘when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless.

History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.

What I’m going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it’s an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a...

I don’t think we can build much of a future,’ says Shara, ‘without knowing the truth of the past. It’s time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.

Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.

Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are – honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.

I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief…of a party…of a finance...

No one does. No one really knows how to be happy. You just get close, sometimes. That’s all I want – just to be close.

I wish I did not know parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.

Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.

Die. Do you think I will? I suppose I must…I exist now, and everything that exists must end, one day. I wonder how I will die, and what it will be like. It will be...

I don’t have the time or the energy to hate,’ says Shara. ‘I only wish to understand. People are what they are.

The political instinct might wear different clothes in different nations, but underneath the pomp and ceremony it’s the same ugliness.

‘George is just a name. A word. A propulsion of air modified by the flexing of throat parts.’ ‘Well, I am George, but…yes. Yes, and…no.’

I put my office right in the middle of the death they threaten us with. […] here I sit, every day, hanging over all this wasted nothing. I will never forget what the world could...

Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties… They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water,...

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.

Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it’s vanity.

A people believe in a god’ – she completes the circle -‘ and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and...

The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.

They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important – that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.

Humanity’s relationship with the Divine is one of mutual give and take, and we mutually opted to part ways. But this perpetuation – setting up a way of thinking, and just letting it run –...

…there is no better time to examine and understand one’s selfhood than when it is dissected and hurtling through darkness.

…history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.

Every second is a forever in Wink. Every day is a cool afternoon waiting to happen. And every life is one lived quietly, with your feet up and your sun-dappled lawn before you as you...

And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life.