“The hurt she suffered has encircled her, it seems: it is the virgin's bower, that vine that cannot bear its own weight but lives by twining itself around another, making it's host unrecognizable.”

“Who has not seen a frail, clinging-vine type of woman, who upon the death of her husband strainghtens up and becomes an oak, around which the growing children twine their lives, and are forever greatful for such a mother? But this strength would never have come out and developed had it not been for the tears that watered the vine and made it into an oak.”

“I can't afford to take responsibilities for others' lives. It's all I can do to bear the weight of my own life and my own loneliness.”

“Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.”

“If the Lord calls us to be a bridge, we have to learn to bear in his strength the weight. And it hurts. And it's good. And the Lord equips.”

“Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.”