“She seems very calm, but that bothers me all the more. I'm horrified that she might be accepting of a life that relegates her to empty corner tables, that my daughter might be making do with a minimum of joy.”

“She lies there, deflating like a stuck balloon because she knew there would be pain and sometimes, as she's learning so quickly and much too early, we are alone with it. Despite Moms and Dads and all the others who might be hovering nearby, in the end we are alone with it.”

“I think as I often have that my mission is to layer her world with richness-not facts, but other hearts, desires, stories, a world populated with angels and idiots, and papered with texts that she can enter and live more than one moment at a time.”

“I push the interest, because I can't stop getting hopeful that she'll latch onto something that will so consume her that she can forget, for long, long periods of time, how inherently difficult her life is.”

“But I hear that tone in his voice, that calming tone that doctors put on because, after all, they are still part witch, part shaman. Their cutting and chemicals can only do so much, and the rest is a bolstering of the mind and spirit to support what healing the body can manage on its own.”

“But beyond these joys, the look and action of numbers, is what they represent. [...] Numbers are an invention of the human mind, and they represent aspects of that mind in ways that are continuously intriguing and often mysterious. [...] What is a calculation but a holding of one constellation of numbers in place while you impact it with another? Such little struggles occur infinitely as we attempt to pin down the elusive elements of existence.”

“When your own father never, ever laughs at you, not even when your little twisted movements are unbearably cute, when there's never a little hidden snicker at the edge of his lips after you risk a question that exposes the very marrow of your soul, then perhaps certain spiritual muscles within you are given a chance to develop, and sometimes to a point where no one can overpower them.”