I did almost nothing on my first day as Idi Amin’s doctor. I had just come in from one of the western provinces, where I’d worked in a bush surgery. 

Patches of time can be recalled under hypnosis. Not only suppressed terrors but those flickering frames of the continuum that, even at the time, seem certain to be forgotten, pleasantly doomed to nonentity. 

When Cyphus looked up from his raking and saw the black park ranger with his Smokey the Bear hat and his park service flashlight hip-mounted, a little cockily

In the long summers of my childhood, games flared up suddenly, burned to a brightness, and vanished forever. The summers were so long that they gradually grew longer than the whole year, they stretched

Once I wrote in violet ink in my boudoir, with slippered feet tucked beneath my chair, where no adversity but a little rain could ever touch me; no adversity, but what my own soul wrought.

Fiamma fainted in chapel this morning. The teachers do not know we make ourselves do it, though they suspect we do. They even had a doctor brought in to examine us, but he said there was nothing wrong with us. He said he had never seen such a healthy group of growing girls. We do look healthy.

Half an inch long, an eighth wide, flat as parchment, sharp enough co pierce and pain anyone of mother born, the gray section of wood sac upon an ecclesiastical purple matte between a gold-leafed garland of frame. 

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.

Today I’ve been watching it snow and thinking of Dorothy. This was in Rochester, before your sister was born, when you were four or five and your father worked most weekends. 

The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis. The Chicken Mask was supposed to hustle business; it was supposed to invite the customer to gorge him or herself within our establishment;