We have come to live among specters, Sara tells herself. They are not people, but silhouettes sketched on a backdrop to deceive us into thinking that the stage is crowded. She searches for an expression, any expression, in their eyes – the eyes of that man on the corner whose raised hand holds a cigarette he is allowing to burn to his fingers; the eyes of that woman who has lifted a dripping jar of water halfway to her head. They will never speak to me, she thinks. I will never know their names.

It is something they will see everywhere – a disregard for danger, a companionship with death. By the end of a year they will know it well: the antic bravado, the fatal games, the coffin shop beside the cantina, the sugar skulls on the frosted cake.

They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

The minute he spoke Spanish, I said, “I’m home.”

I found I’m quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stone cutter – chipping away at the raw material until it’s just right, or as right as you can get it.

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

During your life, everything you do and everyone you meet rubs off in some way. Some bit of everything you experience stays with everyone you’ve ever known, and nothing is lost. That’s what is eternal, these little specks of experience in a great, enormous river that has no end.

One of the best things about aging is being able to watch imagination overtake memory.

You cannot just waste time. Otherwise you’ll die to regret it.