“What makes the self?Experiences. Acculturation.What else?I don't know.What's within you.She says, I don't know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived.You can never know that.No.But there is a you that was there before you were born and that nobody shaped or changed or could have changed.”

“There's that feeling that comes when you read something and the lines speak directly to you, and to you only, even though the person who wrote them died long before you were born, or, even if alive, has no idea you exist. The words seep right into your mind. They pour into your secret hollows and take their shape, a perfect fit, like water. And you are slightly less alone in the universe, because you have been witnessed, because you have been filled, because someone once found words for things within you that you couldn't yourself name – something gesturing not only toward what you are, but what you could become.”

“No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don't understand that, if you've never been in such a family, then you can't know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice.”

“He was like a bottle and music was the wine.... She liked to be near him when it poured.”

“She was awake, alive, full of ideas like branches in a greenhouse, growing thick and rife against the glass.”

“I don't say it and I don't think it. It's their affair and let them eat it with their bread; whether or not they were lovers, they've already made their accounting with God. I tend to my vines, it's their business, not mine; I don't stick my nose in; if you buy and lie, your purse wants to know why. Besides, naked I was born, and naked I'll die: I don't lose or gain a thing; whatever they were, it's all the same to me. And many folks think there's bacon when there's not even a hook to hang it on. But who can put doors on a field? Let them say what they please, I don't care.”

“Never judge others. You both know good and well how unexpected events can change who a person is. Always keep that in mind. You never know what someone else is experiencing within their own life.”