But after the bottle was empty sometime that night, I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. Now.

The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks.

No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do no, it was truly impossible, for how I choose me againse myself?

We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

Easier to get a gun here than to vote or drive. You.

I think of the novelist Haruki Murakami, who compares writing a novel to digging a hole through deep rock to reach a source of water. To access mystery and intuition requires hard work and is a gamble, for there is no guarantee that we will find that source of water.

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.

You’re too sympathetic, the General said. You didn’t see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you’ve been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent.

Let’s just hope history forgets the snafus.