“At least I thought it was a wall. It sure felt like one. It was hard. It was flat. It stretched out on either side of me. You know... wall.”

“I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first. ...I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mache. The second I leaned on it, I'd probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe it's that the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven't noticed.”

“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.”

“for the first time since we had crossed the border, I felt like I was back. After all these years, I was home again, standing on the soil of my ancestors. I sat against one of the house's clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land...it surprised me. I'd been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I handn't. And, under the bony glow of a half-moon, I sensed [the land] humming under my feet. Maybe [it] hand't forgotten me either.”

“In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.”

“If we presume that the boundary of the universe is a kind of surrounding wall,then we think like ancestors who thought there's abyss at the edge of flat earth.”