“For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters. ”

“We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.”

“I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.”

“If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.”

“I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be? The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign. This was why the bearded man had opened the window in my dream. He was saying to me, "Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.”

“I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”

“Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.”