“How are we to help? We need to become aware of all the ways in which we hold the child back from becoming a fully functioning human being: the sink and counter that she cannot reach, the mirror that is too high for her to see herself, the chair that is too big for her to sit comfortably in...the pants that are too tight for her to pull up and down...”

“Newsflash she already has body image issues. It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates. Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel. What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just... It, it hides the flaws we think we have. They make us look beautiful to ourselves. That's what makes us look beautiful to others.Used to be all she needed to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara.And we spend our whole lives trying to feel that way again.”

“She'd been criticized for holding the reins of parenthood too tightly, of controlling her children too completely, but she didn't know how to let go. From the moment she'd first decided to become a mother, it had been an epic battle.”

“- It is clear that we have to come down a bit from the high horse of reason on which we enjoy sitting. We have to be simple and take time to think how to make things understandable to the little ones. We have to become children again, and some find that too hard.”

“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”

“We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. ”