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WE COME UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
“What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?” she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life. I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. “Why must I do what is hardest?” “Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can play the ‘Gloria’?”
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed.
The past recedes from a traveler, she thought.
As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
Most bar girls had hearts of gold and eventually married well, but Helen’s heart was of baser metal.
“We can’t finish if we don’t start so we better start if we’re to finish, yes?”
Matron chose not to call Father de la Rosa of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, because he was a man who had a disapproving manner even when there was nothing to disapprove, and there was plenty here.
‘Perfection of the life or of the work’—I could only do the one. I hope you don’t make that mistake.”
“You know, Marion, once we come here, we are all the same. Eritrean, Amhara, Oromo, big shot, bariya, whatever status you had in Addis it means nothing. In America you begin at zero. The ones who do the best here are those who were zero there.
When you leave your country, you are like a plant taken out of soil. Some people turn hard, they can’t flower again.
