“What's wrong?" he said. "I'll tell you what's wrong: you're killing us.""But I thought that's what you wanted?""We did," my mother wept, "but not this way."It hadn't occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life's work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.”

“When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.”

“He used you, yeah. But what if you hadn't come? My family would have run again, but we would never have been free. We would never stop hunting us.""I know." I thought of my frustration in Paris and I couldn't even imagine how sick of running Seth must be. "That's why I had to come."His eyebrow cocked upward. "And here I thought you came to see me.”

“What would my life, have been like, if I hadn't been put up for adoption? Who would my parents have been then? Or my parent, my mother?”

“If I could have wished what I thought was my perfect mate on the wind and had her come back to me in a storm, I could never have come up with anything as exquisite as you.”

“I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught. ”