Did she or her housemates know about the secret of the bathroom?

Why didn’t you let the old man go, dude?

I hated this image that you invented: me, running, happy, slow motion, as if it were easy to call you Mama, Mommy, Mom so suddenly.

Isn’t it strange (the letter said to me), in Spanish there’s no word for what I am.

It all began by chance, when Arcadio heard the song “Melancholy” by the Orquestra Zodiac.

Respect, I now understood, was nothing more than the fear of his reaction.

Wouldn't you pay to speak to your house?

When I left Colombia, mothers still made sure their daughters’ knees weren’t showing; now nothing is left to the imagination.

Boulevard Barbès, Rochechouart, like a film clip, Arabs, blacks, half-whites.

Because punk is made so people like you will look at people like me.

My son now despises me.

I was the daughter of a tainted man.

I was thirteen years old, it was time to steal.

“Why? Wasn’t there a guava tree at the other guy’s place?”

I was convinced that I really had caused the death of the one I loved most.

There were a lot of weapons being brandished, a lot of threats being shouted, and there was a lot of waiting around. The intifada uprising shifted from the streets onto the TV.

He tossed and turned in his bed, trying to wrest those hours from his memory.

“It wasn’t a civil war. It was a rebellion.”

“They shoot them right outside their front door and then send their folks a bill for the bullets.”

They'd take the girls to the hills for three or five days.

I was bound. I was a registered piece of inventory. I was a liability. I wasn’t going anywhere.

The Fang forest is a free space. Now you are free.

He was a candy you wanted to pop in your mouth and suck real slow.

Damned parents,” he said in a soft voice, “look what they’ve made of me.”

You cover it up, disguise it, use Vaseline, soap . . .

Because of all that, I only rode buses that were almost empty.

It hadn’t been a gastronomic experience so much as an obstacle course.

I have always thought it a gastronomical barbarity to eat bacalao fresh.

Every time she visited, she felt a crushing weariness, as though her entire life were caving in on her.

In a house like this you imagined all the stories had happy endings.

On the street, in Alleyway S, the olive tree still grows.

I’ve chosen a life where I should be illiterate like my mother.

That thing about the bikini would get the gang all riled up.

This skin hanging like a wet sheet over bent bones would have seemed devastating to me.

How is it that in this big whoppin’ America there’s not a single little piece of baling wire?

Then the generous autumn of ’44 suddenly thrust into your hands the power to shape human fates.

“You’ve been trading in stolen knickers, haven’t you!”

He spoke quietly, calmly, with a certain despair that was discernible only on the fringes of his personality.

The first question is “Why did you get a dog?”

“That evening they rang the doorbell . . . . I never saw him again.”

The woman looks at the little girl and sees that her fear is as absolute as her joy was before.

A woman, on the contrary, has nothing to gain from a child.

Your activities over many years, as we scrupulously observed, did not provide any evidence to suggest you wished to regain your soul.

And to think I swore I’d stay out of trouble on this side of the world.

“What a lovely uterus,” he sighed several times.

Ravens are colonizing the room.

She’s still breathing, it’s OK, she thought with relief.

She left the sky and gently descended to earth.

Above all else I appreciate skill and showmanship . . .

It wasn't our fault . . . it was mostly the fault of William Faulkner.

A proponent of “lean management,” Wang-li Wong works to streamline activity within his company.

So You said to me, “What you are about to do, do quickly.”

It didn’t take much time before word spread that I was Yamamoto’s favorite.

You poor thing, with parents like these.

Traffic Jam: a free gift that comes with the purchase of every car.

Well, damn! Eats the temple’s food, then disses the Buddha!

People I’ve told about him all thought that Ei Ploang was my imaginary friend.

I am a mother who has no choices.

We had to learn the prayers by heart to save our own skin.

The bridge is gone. The river is gone.