Status Updates From A Model Childhood (Virago M...

"The imagination of the citizens of America, the world power, who haven't learned to read the faces of the populations they have bombed or bribed, must be based on the assumption that every child on this earth can deem himself fortunate to grow up in the American civilization. This explains their lack of understanding about why other people think their South Vietnamese child-adoption program is obscene."

"But the realization that wasted time can never be regained becomes more and more irrefutable."

"A person who's not afraid to know the truth can't be deceived for long. But since everybody fears some form of truth, one person's deceit usually matches the other's denials, and that's what we call compatibility."

"And could this perhaps be one of the answers to the question by the Pole Kasimierz Brandys about what enables human beings to live under dictatorships: that they learn to restrict their curiosity to realms that are not dangerous to them?"

"Other people's prying is at the root of secretiveness, which can develop into a need, finally into a habit, and produce dangerous vices and great poetry."

"What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we prétend to be strangers."