“You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.”

“All mothers are proud of their children, Jena. I would have been very proud of my child if I had gotten the chance to know him or her. Someday, if you become a mother, you will be proud of your children. It is just the way mothers are.”

“You understand Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and ibexes.”

“Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.”

“When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?”

“You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.”