“My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden. ”

“‎We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. - from the preface to 'Demian”

“We left in the same kind of truck that had brought us to the camp ten years earlier. When it started up, I was taken back to our departure from Pyongyang, and to my mother's tear-lined face as it receded into the distance. The vision struck me with new and unexpected force - for I had all but forgotten my mother.”

“Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men. Frank claimed that she got it all wrong side up: it was men who suffered because they had to put up with the ways of women—and this from the time that they were born until the day they died.”

“Men could be as big as a house and made of granite, but they all had balls in the same place.”

“There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they'd made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.”