“What's it like? Being married?Cold feet. Middle of the night you're sleeping, suddenly, wham, you've got ice cold feet warming themselves on the back of your legs.”

“After a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.”

“...and all they could do was sit, sleep, eat, and be reminded day after day, night after night, of their disease and eventual death.”

“...she bid me to look out on the lawn at the leper girls who were running on lame feet, playing croquet with crippled hands."There is beauty," she said, "in the least beautiful of things.”

“None of the patients could say the experiments didn't yield some benefits. It was the way the experiments were conducted that grated: with cold, clinical detachment. Masks, gloves, and carbolic acid were the order of the day fora ll staff, and while this may have been prudent it only made isolated people feel even more isolated.”

“No. Grief and anger doesn’t shock me.” Catherine paused. “Rachel, do you remember that day at the convent when we saw the old biplane? Remember what I said?” Rachel laughed without amusement. “I don’t even remember what I said.” “’Who can doubt the presence of God in the sight of men whom He has given wings.’ I recall that so precisely because I’ve had time to consider my error.” She smiled. “God didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brain and the spirit to give himself wings. Just as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up. I’ve come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death…is the true measure of the Divine within us. Some, like Crossen, choose to do harm to themselves and others. Others, like Kenji, bear up under their pain and help others to bear it. I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn’t give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.”

“We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.”