“Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.”

“Joshie had always told Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox.”

“-On sharing the love story of the Persian prince Khushraw and the niece of the queen of Armenia Shirin (who were looking for each other but in opposite directions): "Both lovers then departed, looking for each other in opposite directions, a theme universal in its pathos, because we all spend our brief lives doing just that, even if we physically share our beds with the same person every night for years. Always we carry an image in our head of a better person, of an ideal person, which blurs our chances of finding happiness.”

“Do you remember the first time we made love?" He touched his lips to hers as he said it. "We rode up in the elevator like this and couldn't keep our hands off each other, couldn't get to each other quick enough. I was mad for you. I wanted you more than I wanted to keep breathing. I still do." He deepened the kiss as the elevator doors opened. "It's never going to change.”

“We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that's been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, and, yes, even our moments of happiness and triumph. My sister is the one person who truly knows me, as I know her. The last thing May says to me is 'When our hair is white, we'll still have our sister love.”

“Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.”