“Take what you've learned and love someone again. Find someone to love and love without condition. This is why we're all here.”

“And you, Mom. I loved you. You've asked if i felt and understood that you loved me. of course I did. And you know this. I loved your love because it kept me safe and happy and wanted, and it existed beyond words and hugs and eyes.”

“Buttoning the length of my shirt with Left Neglect and one right hand takes the same kind of singular, intricate, held-breath concentration that I imagine someone trying to dismantle a bomb would need to have.”

“Everything she did and love, everything she was, required language.”

“But will I always love her? Does my love for her reside in my head or my heart? The scientist in her believed that emotion resulted from complex limbic brain circuitry that was for her, at this very moment, trapped in the trenches of a battle in which there would be no survivors. The mother in her believed that the love she hadd for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart.”

“You're so beautiful," said Alice. "I'm afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are.""I think that even if you don't know who I am someday, you'll still know that I love you.""What if I see you, and I don't know that you're my daughter, and I don't know that you love me?""Then, I'll tell you that I do, and you'll believe me.”

“I’ve been so focused on what’s horrible and unfair and terrifying about my condition that I hadn’t acknowledged what is positive about my condition, as if the positive had been sitting quietly by itself on the far edge of the left side of my condition, there but completely ignored. I can’t copy a whole cat. But I can recognize it, name it, know what one sounds and feels like, and I can copy most of it, enough for anyone who looks at it to know what I’ve drawn. I am lucky.”