Swing Time: A Novel

I learned to use my voice as a form of misdirection, the same way some magicians make you look at their mouths when you should be watching their hands.

that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

and south of somebody, to gain complete control of them, even if they loved, in return, only a small percentage of us.

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

I was compensation—retribution—for his own childhood.

Aimee herself had no abstract interest in power. She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors,

found that the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental,

Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals?

one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.