“People in the courtroom let loose with their disgust, cursing us, d--ning us, we who had become less than human. Marranos. Pigs.As for me, I felt something rise in my throat: the horror of the world of men.”

“He's nothing fierce or terrible or filled with light. He's like us, sometimes we can't even tell him apart. Sometimes we're the ones who try to save him. He's there to show us who we are. Human beings aren't gods. We makes mistakes.”

“Still, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a mistake for people like us to be tied to a place. If we weren't meant to be ready and willing to wander. If everything we needed was contained in who we were.And what we remember.”

“It was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. Someone who was alone — maybe even more alone — than I was…”

“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. ”

“There comes a time when every one of our people understands that a Jew can never be attached to a place. The rules always change, and we always lose. People will always despise us, and we must be ready to fly away. We cannot have roots in the earth of any country, only in the garden that we carry inside us.”

“As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.”