“I felt like a frog that had just come out of its pit, from which it had contemplated the circle of sky outlined by the rim, and taken it for the whole of the world. I had passed through to the other side of the mirror. (162)”

“I have taken a terrible beating from the truth and feel tamed, wise and desperate, as if I had taken a short route to wisdom through a mirror, and cut myself badly on it as I passed through.”

“There were thousands of children just like her in the world. She had walked through the fire and come out the other side scorched, but not consumed by it.”

“It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.”

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”

“With Catty and Patrick's images in he side mirror waving from the steps of that house like Jethro and Ellie Mae, it occurred to me that something extraordinary had happened. I had effortlessly found a place of acceptance -- a place where people had taken me for me, not for what I could give them -- and I had left it.”