“My parents had irrational fears of Mexico and assumed that once you crossed the border, drug runners made you swallow a heroin balloon and then within the hour you were in a bathtub full of ice and they were harvesting your kidneys.”

“You remarked once in a fit of pique you had made me famous. You were wrong, my dear. You have made me.”

“Thoughts - even fears - were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.”

“Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.”

“The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn't be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying and drugs.”

“How old were you when you first realized that your parents were human? That they were not omnipotent, that what they said did not, in fact, go, they had dreams and feelings and scars? Or have you not realized that yet?Do you still call your parents and have a one-sided conversation with them, child to parent, not adult to adult?”