“Somehow, maybe I could heal her. Even as I thought it, I knew it was delusional. A person needed to want to get better, seek their own sanity. I wanted to be her therapy. I had a Christ complex. I belived I could be her saviour. The problem was, Jesus hadn´t left us, we´d crucified him. I´d forsaken her. She was the only one who could nail my heart to a cross.”

“If I was looking to play with fire, I wanted to dance in the center of the flames.”

“Doctora Zainab looks at her watch. I should leave. But Mai carries her book and sits next to me. She wants me to read it for her. I start to read 'This is the House that Jack Built' and I forget Doctora Zainab's presence there is only Mai's attention and Tamer looking at us. For as long as the book lasts, we are poised, no future, no past.-Minaret”

“Marie is a person whose life experiences, though different from most, have never robbed her of her humanity. At the very depth of her psychosis, she could touch her own wish for sanity even though this touch required every bit of her will to live. From a curled-up position of catatonic silence on her hospital bed, she could still see herself: 'I looked at myself and said, 'No more. I can't go on this way anymore...if I ever want to get out of here, if I ever want to get better" (xiii)”

“Nothing‟s going to change, Jamie had said that day, but I‟d known even then this wasn‟t true. My mother had always been the point that I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well. These months she‟d been gone, I felt like I‟d been floating, loose and boundaryless, but now that I knew where she was, I kept waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn‟t. Instead, I was more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one I‟d left behind”

“That waitress was flirting with me," Dad announced once we were out of the restaurant. He said it in his "whispering voice," which meant it was still loud enough for the waitress, all of her coworkers, and the shoppers at every other store in the mall to overhear."Ew," I said. "She was not."Dad chuckled with delight over how hot and eligible he imagined himself to be. "She kept coming over to 'try to collect my plate'...""Because that is her job," I reminded him."And the way she looked at your mother? Pure jealousy!" Dad slipped his arm around Mom's waist. "Poor thing. I left her a big tip.”

“Usually while I lay in bed, I liked to think of new things I could do for Lynnie. Maybe I could let her try my pillow to see if she liked it better. Or I could bring her a new cracker she'd never tried. Or maybe I could even find a new book that she'd never heard of and read it to her, even though she had heard of every book in the world. That night I knew that nothing I could do would make her feel better. So I lay in bed and listened to her mournful noise and didn't feel love or hate or anger or anything at all except despair.”