[In]the too solid three-dimensional city, I could never feel myself as anything but spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid. - V. S. Naipaul

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.

And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.