“Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you...”

“No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.”

“There are many, many difficult times, god knows. If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something. It could be children, or it could be house plants, you know? By doing that you come to understand your own limitations. That's where it starts.”

“I guess you just lacked the courage, the guts to strike out on your own. And so when it all came to an end, you were still living that way, a life you never meant to be anything more than a stopgap, filling in for the real thing.”

“For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they've emerged. You don't even notice that you've been inside until it's too late for you ever to go back-- that's how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.”

“When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.”

“I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.”