“It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing.”

“No person could fill twenty-six years of lack. And each personality had learned from experience that is was less painful to set limits than to have some external person set limits for us. (95)”

“The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom”

“No, what she had in front of her was a grown-up person who had built a life around a terrifying abyss, on terrain that had already collapsed, and yet who had succeeded, far away from here, among people Alice didn't know.”

“This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”

“Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.”