“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“I rested my hand on hers. Actually, when I wasn’t paying attention, it was in hers. I don’t know if it helped. I don’t know if it made any difference at all, if she had even the vaguest sense that I was there, that I was thinking about her and hurting for her and praying for her. All I could do was try. All I could do was be here. All I could give her was my love, even if she never knew.”

“She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.”