“Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”

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

“It's a strange life, isn't it? ...A Rom with no tribe. No matter how hard you look, you can never find a home. Because to us, home is not a building or a tent or a vardo... home is a family.”

“It's funny how your relationship with your own looks changes when you go weeks without seeing yourself. None of us really knows what we look like after all. In that nanosecond it takes for a mirror to give our faces back to us our mind has already done all sorts of perverse rearranging.”

“When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run. . . .”

“And I told you before, I'll sell you any of the thoroughbreds.”“I didn't make any of those thoroughbreds. I didn't make them what they are.”“You made all of them what they are.”I don't look at him. “None of them made me who I am.”