“I studied her carefully. She was strong, this one. Strong willed. Strong minded. Still, she was not an indígena. I was not certain that she was yet strong enough to hear everything. I started slowly, as if probing a stream with a stick to see what lay beneath the surface of the water.”

“She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to”

“A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.”

“I watched my mother do what she did best, and realized there would never be a way to cut myself from her entirely. No matter how strong or weak I was, she was a part of me, as crucial as my own heart. I would never be strong enough, in all my life, to do without her.”

“Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.”

“I trusted her about as far as I could throw her. I was strong and she was small, but it still wasn't very far.”