“The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years”

“The woman in whose body I had grown, in whose house I’d been raised was, in some vital ways, a stranger to me. I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl with the pasted on smiles and the folding tab dresses.”

“If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.”

“This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.”

“Hmm, it may have taken him thirty-five years, but he finally found himself a woman with a good sense of direction.”

“All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.”