“There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.”

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

“The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

“I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.”

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

“They say:Speak for us (to whom?)Some say: Avenge us (on whom?)Some say: Take our place.Some say: WitnessOthers say (and these are women)Be happy for us.”

“I try to congure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't.It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.”