“To paraphrase Woody Allen in Annie Hall, love was too weak a word for what I felt for that tiny crying creature who had my eyes, my mouth, my hair. I lurved my daughter, my Ava. I looved her. I lurfed her.”

“...I might mention my belief that girls who like Woody Allen movies are nicer girls than girls who don't...”

“I love you, Maggie May Young. Always and forever.” And then my mouth touched hers and I felt my future begin.”

“I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.”

“Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl.How could I not love this man? But it was a love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness. Now Saint is a ghost. He and I can now love equally. He knows the things I have been hiding all these years. Now I must tell my daughter everything. That she is a daughter of a ghost. She has no chi . This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is a way a mother loves her daughter.I hear my daughter speaking to her husband downstairs. They say words that mean nothing. They sit in a room with no life in it. I know a thing before it happens. She will hear the table and vase crashing on the floor. She will come upstairs and into my room. Her eyes will see nothing in the darkness, where I am waiting between the trees.”

“Her words at the party replayed in my mind.If we were in another life, I could love you.Abby was lying weak and sick in my arms, depending on me to take care of her. Inthat moment I recognized that my feelings for her were a lot stronger than I thought. Sometime betweenthe moment we met, and holding her on that bathroom floor, I had fallen in love with her.”