“I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts.”

“I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.”

“A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.”

“Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth. ”

“You can't know somebody, I thought, till you've followed him home.”

“My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.”

“I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”