“My real mom died when I was born—hemorrhaged to death while giving birth tome, which has never been one of my favorite memories—and Dad married Denise before I’d turned a year. Without even asking my opinion on thematter. Denise and I never really clicked.”

“The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice.”

“Why was I born, when will I die?Who can change the day of his birth,who has a say in the day of his death?Come, my beloved, I want to ask the spiritof the wine to make me forget that weshall never understand.”

“Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.”

“There's no use asking Mom and Dad to talk to Nana about her punishment. They won't stand up to her. They never do. This is why I decide I am not going to speak to Nana or Papa or my parents. What Leila and I did was wrong. But now I have been put in the middle of something else entirely. Something about Adam and the adults and things that happened before I was born, maybe even before Adam and Uncle Hayden and Mom were born.~pgs 144-145; Hattie on adulthood”

“When I was a kid my mom used to tell me that if i have sex before i was married, my... junk would turn black and fall off.”