“I could not believe that I was like other thousands of unhappy mortals who love, forget, and die without reckoning something eternal, something definitive.”
“Mother tongues, like any other first love, are very hard to forget. They are loyal and forgiving. Even when our speech shrivels and our writing is plagued with errors. Even when our native letters appear foreign and our native sounds ring forsaken. After all, our mother tongues raised us. They knew us when we didn’t know ourselves. They watched us learn to speak, to write, to reason. They taught us to love and to grieve. They showed us the rules and the exceptions. They know they’ll echo within our walls long after we become guests in our own homes: from the way we will combine the new words, to the way we will whisper the old prayers.”
I’d never be able to maintain a secret identity if I had Superman-style invulnerability – there are far too many drivers in this city who would rather straight up kill a pedestrian than arrive at their destination three seconds later, and the temptation to assert the precise letter of my right of way would be overwhelming.
