Sara Novi

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I'd learned a few from the Uncles__omething about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen table__ut 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'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