“I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.”

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

“The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.”

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”

“...judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish: it can only add a second atrocity to the original one.”

“Time was such an element, she now believed. The stretch of existence between events, consisting of countless other events, all strung together in complex patterns of cause and effect, all laid out like images sewn onto a tapestry, creating a sequence of scenes that, once one stood back, was revealed to be co-existing. Present all at once.”