In this country, you’re born the day you get your papers. Here, we don’t have a maternity ward, we have the police headquarters.

There was a bush that emitted a strong smell almost exactly like that of semen. Some men and women noticed it as they passed by. It was rather shocking, in a vicar’s garden.

From there the situation would quickly escalate, both of them bringing up recent affronts or humiliations, branching out to injuries from further back in time, wounds of increasingly ancient provenance coming to light.

Failure is the story, but the story itself is also failure.

He is swimming downhill, backward through time. 

I found out only later that when my ma called Ensign Wang a lunatic, she’d meant it literally—he really was a mental patient.

My colleague Alassio is the only person left at the school where I teach who believes that the working class is the engine of history.

When my daughters turned twelve I initiated them into the mysterious powers with which women of my family line have since time immemorial been endowed.

They were in the smaller, formal mess⁠—far enough off the main grid that you could forget for a second that you were living at the end of eight miles of tunnels.

Before the crash, they’d had different ideas about their own resilience, and each other’s.