“Try as I may I do not succeed in getting back into my original envelope, let alone making myself comfortable in my old self; the disorder there is far too great; things have been moved, the lamp is black and dead, bits of my past litter the floor.”
“I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched her clothes. ‘And she was little, no more than five, and she didn’t die here at all. No one killed her. Nothing so special for her at all.’
‘How your words belie your thoughts,’ he said.
‘Not so, I think of two things simultaneously. There’s a distinction in being murdered. I was murdered. […] I’m trimmed in memories as if in old furs. I lift my arm and the sleeve of memory covers it. I look around and see other times.’”
”[…] I thought it meant, I am sorry, until he wrote on the board ‘Mea culpa. I am guilty.’
[…]
When you’re in a state of grace the soul is a pure dazzling white surface, but your sins create abscesses that ooze and stink. You try to save yourself with Mea culpa, the only Latin words that mean anything to you or God.”
