“Religion is about responsibility to a community and a tradition ...”

“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.”

“How is it we come through the most difficult miles?  Do we come silent or singing?  Do we come in company, or do we come alone?  Are we all alone on the open plains under starlit skies, all alone with the cooing owls in the dark of early morning?  Our ancestors, our grandmothers, will their spirits take pity on us?”

“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.”

“Who watches over us when we leave?  Who remembers our names when disappear ourselves from home? Who hears the absence of our voices?  Who misses the sound of our stories?”

“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. ”