“During our visit, we noticed she was mixing up words. She started referring to Muslims as Mormons. After 9/11, she told Jon and me how it was important for America to stop the radical Mormons because they had perpetrated the attacks on the Twin Towers.There was no way we could convince her of the difference. We'd just smile and not. "That's right, Grandma, all the Mormons got together on September 11th and ran their bicycles into the Twin Towers!”

“How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival at a difficult point in Mormon history. ”

“So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.”

“Mormons invented themselves just as other religious and ethnic groups invented themselves. But Mormons did so in such a singularly impressive way that we will probably always remain baffled as to how exactly it happened.”

“You know", Grandma says, "you could learn a lot from Dr.Quinn. She knows how to make soap from a sheep's guts. And she had twins when she was fifty. Fifty!”

“It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.”