Little Bee

That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.

How to explain to my son that the warning signs were so slight? That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we really should be laying the plates on top of it.

To flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the timing that

She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey. I tapped the girl on her shoulder, and pulled at her sari, and I said to her: Please, you must try to talk to them in English. The sari girl looked at me, and she stopped talking in her butterfly languag

On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.