“Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful.”

“This was a passage in which everyone moved and was unfathomable, which was how Thomasina saw people. She was not a person who froze someone's character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one truthful or untruthful. To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”

“It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”

“…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.”

“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.”

“She waited the eternal instant that women wait when a horror jumps out at them. It is an instant that men do not use for waiting, an instant that opens a door to life or death. Women look through the opening because something might be alive in there.”

“Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.”