“My mother lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able to repair herself. That in fact she is repairing herself, hour by hour.”

“The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”

“She tried to allow herself only one biting remark an hour, and she had already overstepped her allowance.”

“It seems as if everything she’s cared about over the past twenty-five years has disintegrated, oblivious to the time and energy she has invested. She can call herself a physician but can’t take the same pride in this she used to. She is not really a wife at the moment, not much of a mother. Somewhere along the way, Somer realizes, she has lost herself.”

“For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.”

“Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.”