“I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable.”

“I am poor, but I am rich. I have my children, I have a garden with roses, and I have my faith and the memories of those who have gone before me. What more is there?”

“I have been praying, too, for the first time in my life. That parson, Tugwell, he helped me see - not the error of my ways, for I knew them all to well already - but what was wanting in me. I am far from perfect, I know, but I am changed and changing still”

“Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known--not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being--one of many ways--and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”

“I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.”

“I am not african. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. I am not taina. Taino is in me, but there is no way back. I am european.Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am new. History made me. My first language is Spanglish. I was born at the crossroadsand I am whole.”