Ilse’s Reviews > Kudos > Status Update

I said I wasn't sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting: when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.

And there is no better hiding place, he said, than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.

And there is no better hiding place, he said, than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.

The men of this nation are the sweetest but also the most childlike. Behind every man is his mother, who made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn't make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her.

It may be the case that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.

She preferred being that sylph with the waterfall of hair. In some part of herself, she believed that that was who she still was. A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.