“Logically she understood that everyone had something they were hiding, some hurt they kept deep inside, some reason why they were not really normal either, but she didn’t understand how they functioned. She didn’t understand how they got out of bed every morning or breathed in and out without the hurt weighing down their lungs.”

“I wanted to tell you everything. And that hurt because some things were too scary. Some things even I didn’t understand. How could I tell someone—someone I was really talking to for the first time—everything I was thinking?I couldn’t. It was too soon.”

“While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who’d hurt him, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to hurt him or that I didn’t know how I’d hurt him. It didn’t matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn’t need a name to be wrong. It didn’t need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry.”

“here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”

“If she were to die, it would be out here. Not that she wanted to die. She really didn’t. She just felt suddenly like she needed, wanted more. There had to be more to life besides the constant training, orders, the rules, having every move you ever made watched and recorded. There had to be more. More what she didn’t know, but she wanted it.”

“When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.”