Fear is a ghost. It grows in proportion to what we all know and never say. It swells on what we do and do not admit to our own awareness. I will offer up my own life as proof, because I am every day afraid. Take my ghosts from me.

I saw that he wanted to help me out of the hole into which I kept falling. I saw, also, that his weak gray eyes could not summon a sunbeam, and his old ears could barely pick up my voice in the same room. So once again I learned to keep my mouth shut. Whatever is happening here, I am alone with it.

From the grown-up talk around, I deduced that I’d escaped some terrible fate back in Sicily, where everyone was poor and hungry. We were also poor and hungry. I grew up nourished by a story, the story of my good fortune—I was an American citizen, I lived in the richest country in the world, where I would learn English, work hard, marry well, and

A thing doesn’t hurt you so much if you draw it close as it does when you keep pushing it away.

Kindness has its own electric current. I am almost never expecting it.

I want You to know me, baby, but I also want You to love me. I worry that success at one aim will mean failure at the other.

would like to learn a new use for my emptiness—my spaciousness. Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.

“What can two people do against church and state, Ania?” “We can find two more people. Two more after that…”

Why should money make evil comprehensible to anyone? But it does precisely this. Greed, violence, cruelty—money can explain them. Money can make the most heinous act seem like a sane one. A business decision, a necessary calculation. Evil’s genius is to costume itself as sense. The “reasonable choice.”