“... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.”

“That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.”

“There's something about her," Caire said in a low voice. "She cares for everyone about her, yet neglects herself. I want to be the one who cares for her.”

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”

“Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.”

“She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.”