Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history’s ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance a

Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him.

“We have children because we can’t remember our own first taste of ambrosia.”

The core of Wei’s belief is that without real memory, there can be no real reconciliation.

All life is an experiment. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

We have always lived on a boat, you know? That’s what Earth is, a boat in space.”

She broke off a piece from a candy bar and put it in your mouth while you sat in the high chair. As the stearate in the cocoa butter absorbed the heat from your mouth and melted over your tongue, complex alkaloids were released and seeped into your taste buds: twitchy caffeine, giddy phenethylamine, serotonic theobromine.

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.

“Though we were not born on the same day of the same month of the same year, we ask that Fate give us the satisfaction of dying on the same second of the same minute of the same hour.”