“For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.”

“As for myself, the part of me that still believes that I was given up because there was something wrong with me will diminish with the passage of time. But I feel sad when I think about all those years of not really knowing the truth. Would it have made me feel better about myself if I had known my story? Or would it still have taken me this long to understand what it all meant?”

“Dani said this woman, with whom she’d lived for two years, had never known her. “I feel like people accept the first thing I show them,” she said, “and that’s all I ever am to them.”

“My native gifts are not remarkable, but I have a certain force of character which has enabled me in a measure to supplement my deficiencies. I have common-sense. Most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in the front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating. For many years I have been described as a cynic; I told the truth. I wish no one to take me for other than I am, and on the other hand I see no need to accept others' pretences.”

“I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.”

“Standing there in-between two disgusting Dumpsters in some crappy alleywith the whole world crumbling down around me, and hearing Alex say thosewords, all the fear I have carried with me since I learned to sit, stand, breathe—since I was told that at the very heart of me was something wrong, somethingrotten and diseased, something to be suppressed—since I was told that I wasalways just a heartbeat away from being damaged—all of it vanishes at once.That thing—the heart of hearts of me, the core of my core—stretches and unfurlseven further, soaring like a flag: making me feel stronger than I ever have before.”