“The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks.”

“I'm so lucky to have a family, adopted or not! I'm so lucky to be alive!" Judy Ellis Taylor tells her three school-age girls.... They roll their eyes.”

“This is the first time for the girl, atime of revelation.Mysteries unravel at this height,patterns emerge.She stands woman--tall, shoulder to shoulder,with the sun and laughs to think thatsuch a splendid world had ever frightened her.All that she sees, farm and forest, pasture andprairie, city and country, and continent,stretches before her like tomorrows filled with promise . . .She was born to this kingdom.In time it will be hers to explore, tomake her own.One climb is over, another just beginning.She is rich in days, wealthy in possibilities.And here in this crowning moment,For the very first time . . .She knows.”

“She is an animal. Servile as a dog. And yet if he is careful to make no demands, to leave the air between them open, another version of the windup girl emerges. As precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul, emerging from within the strangling strands of her engineered DNA.”

“I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.”

“The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment. Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.”