“For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.”

“So many times, I had chosen not to be with her. Too busy. Too tires. Don't feel like dealing with it. Church? No thanks. Sinner? Sorry. Come down to visit? Can't do it, maybe next week.”

“I meant no disrespect. It's just that I had always felt that rabbis, priests, pastors, any cleric, really, lived on a plane between mortal ground and heavenly sky. God up there. Us down here. Them in between.”

“But my father, a thief in many ways, had robbed me of my concentration.”

“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.”

“I don't want to fight," she whispered. "Just come home.”

“What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?”