“The scribe was a strict teacher and he did not accept anything less than perfect...Like a mother sensing the baby quickening within her, suddenly, to me, the letters were no longer hostile and unwieldly. I had command of them, with my head and with my hand...The words struck, as clear and as pure as a bell peal on a winter morning.”

“Then all of a sudden, his hazel eyes penetrated me in a way that succeeded in melting away my anger. My heartbeat quickened and my adrenaline pumped but in a different way than it had been a few minutes earlier. Suddenly it was like I forgot how to form words. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.”

“Rachel, you take her,” my mother said, clearly uncomfortable. “She might like you.” “No. Mom, no!” I protested, but it was my mother we were talking about, and it was either take the baby or have her hit the floor.”

“At night I no longer dreamed, nor did I let my imagination work during the day. The once vibrant escapes of watching myself fly through the clouds in bright blue costumes, were now a thing of the past. When I fell asleep, my soul became consumed in a black void. I no longer awoke in the mornings refreshed; I was tired and told myself that I had one day less to live in this world. I shuffled through my chores, dreading every moment of every day. With no dreams, I found that words like hope and faith were only letters, randomly put together into something meaningless - words only for fairy tales. ”

“I made my bed and I sleep like a baby with no regrets and I don't mind saying it's a sad, sad story when a mother will teach her daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger. And how in the world can the words that I said send somebody so over the edge that they'd write me a letter saying that I better shut up and sing or my life will be over?”

“...I couldn't let go of her hand. For a few moments, I looked at the shape of it, the roundness of her fingers. I realized that her hands gave me a sense of comfort because they were the most familiar part of her to me. Those hands had always been in my sight when I was a child. Those were the hands I held crossing the street, the hands that made me lunch and cooked me dinner, the hands that stroked me when I was feeling sad, the hands on the steering wheel driving me all over town, the hands whose rings I had looked at and played with, turning them around on her finger. I knew then that regardless of how we had fought and cried and how adoption had affected us both, those hands, free of words and emotional baggage, encompassed everything. They were pure love-all the love that she had for me.”