Port-au-Prince has become an amputated town, throbbing in upon itself. Grief muffles the rhythms of this Caribbean port city—tourists gone, trade vanished, a crazed dictator pressing the Haitian millions into misery. Still, amid desolation and dismay, the smell of ripe mangoes is good, sun and salt are good, the sway of Creole girls a? they go about their day is a happy reminder of time that was and time still to come—why not?

The Baroness was a charming creature. The Baron had taken her from a family of high principles and had no reason to mistrust her, despite the fact that the tooth of time had already gnawed into him quite deeply

 Life without God’s love is like a donut, ’cause there’s a hole in the middle of your heart!

The combis that, sending gusts of taped reggae and mbaqanga into the traffic, transport blacks back and forth between township and city, now carry a strange cargo of whites. The street committee

The house to themselves. Children with the house to themselves. When they were still children, what wild release that signaled; romping from room to room, all lights burning, bedtime banished

Somehow it wasn’t altogether a surprise when Waldeck Brand and his wife bumped into Carlitta at a theater in New York in 1953. The Brands were six thousand miles away from their home in South Africa, 

I rose at eight, so that my parents wouldn’t think I was a bum, and sat at my little desk, really a folding snack table in the guest room, doing the crossword until they left for work, when I sometimes took a quick nap. 

The room was about thirty feet by twenty. There was a door leading into the room from the hall. There was a French window, and a larger window looking over the landscape, down to the village, across the harbor, out to the bay. There was a fireplace, and in the grate early in the morning before it was cleaned were the remains of last night's fire. 

One day when she was five Angelica was in the gazebo, playing snap with her brothers. Suddenly she caught sight of something rising from the ha-ha. It was a special hippopotamus. “Fly at once!” he said. 

This was what he did when he felt like a failure: he withdrew. Erika said he withdrew into himself. He said, No—his self was no refuge. He understood what she meant, of course, the figure of speech.