Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.""I hope that's not true", I said.

The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.

Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.

I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I'd learned a few from the Uncles—something about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen table—but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life there wasn't difficult enough to warrant an adult's belief in magic.

...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.