“Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.”

“We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun.Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.”

“I had made it somewhere special, and I'd gotten there all on my own. Nobody had given it to me. Nobody had told me to do it. I'd climbed and climbed and climbed, and this was my reward. To watch over the world, and to be alone with myself. That, I found, was what I needed.”

“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“Mother! Katie remembered. She had called her own mother "mama" until the day she had told her that she was going to marry Johnny. She had said, "Mother, I'm going to marry..." She had never said "mama" after that. She had finished growing up when she stopped calling her mother “mama.” Now Francie…”

“At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths—first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.”