Our children always grow to live in a foreign country

Four children of the same parents do not receive the same parenting.

Often we do not grasp what has happened to us until we tell someone else about it.

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’.

Dull people found him amusing. Interesting people thought him desperately dull.

The descendants of those who inhabited the region during that cataclysmic moment of turmoil and warfare sometimes refer to it as “the time when the stars fell.”

Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language and culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind. The list of such men is short

Without the stars it felt like someone had unplugged the world

Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

She considered other writers aloofly. “Shakespeare,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps Goethe,” she added, using a pronunciation of her own.

The Major had told him one day that in five years’ time no one would read any more. Later, archaeologists would ponder on, argue about, what books had been for. ‘It’ll all be telly; visual aids.’ ‘Then why are more books published every year?’

Seldom penetrated by love for mankind as I am, I sometimes feel sorry for the poor who don’t read Shakespeare

Did people then only go for the light and warmth, the coffee after the Sunday morning service and a friendly word from the vicar?

In 1970 the American Indian Student Association at the University of Minnesota satirized the archaeological establishment by submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation that called for the exhumation and scientific analysis of human remains in a pioneer cemetery.

They said he had tuberculosis, but it was a mysterious death—one of the first I heard of—that fluttered the nerve endings of our collective subconscious. Someone was walking on our graves.

If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever.

“You can feel it on that one, like a tingle. You ever feel something like that? Like you can just feel the ghosts of the raped around a certain kind of man?” “I know what you mean,” Trace says. She does. She has felt this, often.

I don’t want to divide the world up into categories anymore, I want to understand.

My writing utopia supports both introversion and community. It’s urban, but also oceanic. We heal our shameful histories with honesty and reparations. Everyone has a guaranteed minimum income. In my writing utopia, we center creativity and joy. We don’t bend to the needs of capitalism.  We know that imperialistic story structures will never destroy the empire.

I get that sometimes, the strange sense of waking up and being shocked to realize that I am me and not some other person.