“I don't want anything now, Sarie thought, not a thing in the world. I have everything I want. Yesterday I wanted so much without knowing what. Today I've got everything...”

“You see, love is strong. Stronger than hate even. Love is the only thing that can kill hate, nothing else. You see, hate destroys and that's why love is stronger. It builds. There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man. Love keeps one alive. It makes you understan and fight...”

“Ingrid shrugged...like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants.”

“Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere”

“I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.”

“...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.”

“The goyim are a curious people," Malpesh once said to me, before he had discovered who and what I was. "Not curious that they want to know things," he clarified, "curious that they don't.”