“Our whole family thrives under pressure. It's like our family motto or something.Apart from my brother Peter, of course. He had a nervous break down. But the rest of us.”

“I mean, it's like we all get our raw materials from our families―but it's up to us whether we build bridges or bombs.”

“I remember my brother as such a gentle and loving child, the best big brother a girl could hope for, but I remember when I started to sense our family's world tilting on its axis, the kaleidoscope turning, when things started to go wrong. From then on, it was like we were still ourselves, but our lives played out as though reflected back to us from a funhouse mirror.”

“Jenny-girl, you might say that the motto of the Black family is 'what's another brother?”

“It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”

“Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still.”