“I am not the same kind of Mormon girl I was when I was seven, eight, or eighteen years old.  I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother.  I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith. ”

“How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival at a difficult point in Mormon history. ”

“I can’t go on like this, I told myself. And You can’t possibly want me to feel this way, I demanded of God.  God didn’t argue. Forced to choose between my nostalgia for the faith of my childhood and my dignity as an adult, I put down the doll and drove away.”

“I said "it is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart, my heart, my heart." No one says any of these things.  But they should.”

“At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.”

“when i am drawing i can convice myself that i am a good person, that i am worth something”

“You see that? That big messy spiral of people, moving, trying to find God? I ask them, as the exodus unfolds once again on screen.That right there is Zion. Get there however you can.”