You never knew what to expect with Ingrid. One minute she could be sawing the locks off Pierpont’s freezers; the next, providing shelter for the homeless birds of Switzerland.

Aura is convinced that the entire country has succumbed to a collective amnesia. This is what happened in a society, where no one is permitted to grow old slowly. Nobody talks of the past, for fear their wounds might reopen. Privately though, their wounds never heal.

I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence.

You have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.

She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasure and perfected selections.

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.

Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent.

In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.

Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.

It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference.