Kingsolver, Barbara (Barbara Kingsolver)

Borders crumble; they won't hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children of the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food - there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighbourhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

-- Barbara Kingsolver