“He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.”

“Was your old man in the war?""He was in the air force. He built runways.""The fucking air farce. He ever tell you about it? Did he live?""Yes, he lived. He spoke once about Vietnam.""If he only spoke about it once, he wasn’t lying.”

“He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to th waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.”

“It is one of those rare moments when we seem to forget everything,forget this insistence on living in the moment.”

“The ghost of a smile appeared on her face. “Learn to love the moment you are in. Treasure your experiences, for precious moments too quickly pass you by, and if you are always rushing toward the future, or pining for the past, you will forget to enjoy and appreciate the present.”

“A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.”