Why do you say vague things if you don't want to be asked about them?

I feel uneasy. It's not often that you encounter the real person behind a good-natured mask, the darkest parts of someone. It's not comfortable when you do.

Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.

I was beginning to feel that I had finally found a place to stay, a place that was not so unstable or corrupt or controlling that I could actually belong there. You would think that I would have learned by now—such a place does not exist.

If someone offers you an opportunity to get closer to your enemy, you always take it. I know that without having learned it from anyone.

Sometimes I still forget to look for the gentler parts of her. For so long all I saw was the strength, standing out like the wiry muscles in her arms or the black ink marking her collarbone with flight.