“We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.”

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.”

“Fictional stories were written so that they seemed real, kind of like a well-executed lie. Fiction creates an unreal world that's better than the real one.”

“We were lazy people on an adventure, flirting with life but too shy to go all the way.”

“However, nothing is all too bad, and there were many good people to meet in prison from all over Africa with interesting stories for us to listen to as we stood through the nights and days, stepping on roaches and scratching lice but at least getting to learning something interesting about other countries and other people.”