“I typed becasue I had to. I typed because I was afraid I might disappear." --Edgar Mint”

“It's a wonderful epiphany: with a lie I can change reality; with a lie I can change the world.”

“If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.”

“Unlike Rosa, I can see no divine purpose behind the tangle of this existence, no ordering hand. It is all a mystery, or more accurately, a mess. There are no heroes or villains, no saviors or demons or angels. Only those who have died and those of us who, for whatever reason, have survived. None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don't know that I will ever have faith in Him.”

“There was one difference I would come to realize, between white kids and Indians. Among white kids there are tattletales everywhere. Indians? An Indian wouldn't tattle to save his own mother. Indians, over the years, have learned the value of keeping their mouths shut.”

“But Golden's dark form in the doorway had imprinted something new and painful on the hard plates of her chest: that old devil, hope. The kind of hope that abandons you in your worst moments and is suddenly there again, weeks later, trailing you like the stubborn, slinking dog who will not take no for an answer. The kind of greedy hope that tricks you into believing that at least some of the things taken from you might be restored, that after everything, you might find your way back to something like happiness.”

“For Golden it was hard not to think that there might be something wrong about a household in which the dog was wearing underwear and the children weren't.”