“He was with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to know. He burned the fear out of me until all was left was desire.”

“Such bliss is not meant to last. In my husband's house, my children were my real gifts.”

“And after that until the end, there was no relief from being a girl with chores that she wasn’t being paid for, a girl with no new sandals and a friend who wasn’t a friend but a mistress, and a family that wasn’t but people who owned her and ordered her about, and nothing at all but her pretty breasts and her round bottom and her misbehaving hair to help her feel any different.”

“It was a crying shame!”

“There is no right and wrong, and precepts are for fools. Every thing is just as it is! And we must experience things without condemning them, because if we condemn them, then we are becoming too involved.”

“I’ll always be broken,” I went on. “Because when I came here, no one fixed me. It’s not that they didn’t care to fix me. These crazy, wonderful people I met at Craneville didn’t fix me because they didn’t think I needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t because they were ‘crazy’…it was because they were the only people who knew that I could only face the world out there again as someone different. As someone who wasn’t perfect, who wasn’t normal, who didn’t have all the answers…someone who was somehow ‘fixed’ by being broken.”

“Doing your duty is having no sense of guilt about what you are doing.”