“To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”

“You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.”

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”

“Even though I had a history with that house, it didn't matter. You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have...is now.”

“In this world, you were either strong, or you were dead. you did what you had to if you wanted to survive. And i could barely take care of myself; i couldn't worry about someone else's insecurities.”

“I took a look out the window before I left the room, though, to see how all the perverts were doing, but they all had their shades down. They were the heighth of modesty in the morning.”