“Killing people is wrong.”

“She was a woman of a certain age. A woman who wanted a man, but for whom romance was like a foreign country she had not visited in some time. . . .In the mirror over the dresser in her bedroom, she stared at her face. Some of the silvering had worn off the mirror, and soft, dark streaks slanting across the glass gave her image the aspect of a cameo, delicate, but distinctly antique. . . .She would not speak with the waiter in French, nor would she order anything weird, such as squid. Certainly nothing that would be strong on her breath, like garlic, because what if. . . .? She hadn't been kissed in thirty years.”

“When all is said and done, later in this century, and in the next one, and the century after that, it will be understood that. . .the greatest American writer of our time was James M. Cain.”

“We don't always come out unbreakable the first time. So we are broken and rebuilt several times, until there is no question that we can stand on our own”

“What all of this suggests is that we need a more complex understandingof identities. If we identify on the basis of race, class, sexuality, orgender alone we cannot make sense of the ways these identificationscombine and change over time. The used-to-be-working class nowprofessional woman, the woman of mixed racial parentage who appearswhite, the divorced mother who is now a lesbian, the former lesbian whois now straight, or the former lesbian who is now a man. Identities arealways in motion; they are mobile (Ferguson, 1993). This is particularlythe case for those who have been placed in identity categories that do notquite seem to fit; it is also true of many more of us, in varied ways. Justask our current President, whose own origin story, of which he has spokenand written eloquently, is exceedingly complex. We need, I believe, aconception of identities that embraces this complexity, that takes intoaccount temporality and also specificity.”

“Dying is a universe of its own. ”

“You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few brief minutes and then the wind blows away your footprints”