“Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.”

“I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.”

“That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.”

“Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That is the meaning of honour.”

“There I sat, in the wreckage of my apartment, in the wreckage of my life – no love, no prospects, a gnawing sense of existential futility along with the certainty that a better life was being lived by everyone else”

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”

“I wonder how many ways there are for a mother to produce that wreckage in her own daughter, and my muscles tense as I think of them.”