"Memory is a fragile thing, but it is also our most powerful tool for understanding the past."

The novel is a very democratic form. It allows for the expression of many voices, many points of view.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

To understand is to forgive, even when there's nothing to forgive.