“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?”

“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?”

“What do we do with ourselves when we find we have failed to become the adults we dreamed as pious children?”

“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. ”

“Courage doesn't mean being free from fear; it means learning to work through fear and speak even when we are afraid.”

“Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?”

“What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.”