Quotes from Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

How terrible it is to recognize that one's brilliance rests solely upon the small-mindedness of others.

She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely. She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?

If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?" she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van." Chloroform, I guess." Really?" She brightened. It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would.

But that's what I mean: you're Ms. Hempel forever. At least to us.

If you were M. Pujol, Madeleine says, I would reach out my hand to you. Like this. If you were M. Pujol, Adrien says, I would press my mouth against your pulse. Like this. If you were he, she says, I would cup your chin in my fingers. If you were he, he says, I would take those fingers into my mouth. Then my mouth would envy my fingers, she says. Then your mouth must usurp your fingers, he says. And then, she says, I would do this.

This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling.

When you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless...But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird.

Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil goes numb.