“It's all about family [jake]. It was always about family. It will always be that way if I have anything to say about it.”

“This was her special time, this early part of the day when the sun was just about to creep over the horizon. It was a brand new day in which anything could happen.”

“It's not about perfect. It's about effort. And when you bring that effort every single day, that's where transformation happens. That's how change occurs.”

“There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.”

“The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.”

“Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.”

“I want you to know everything about me, Lexi, to see inside me, beyond my gruff arrogance, beyond the hurt and loneliness, to the man underneath it all.There are things about me no one knows, but I want to share them with you.”