“Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear.”

“I felt my true, unworthy self to be far away from his clutching grasp, hidden from his admiring gaze.”

“Anyone can grow into something beautiful.”

“If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously, as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.”

“Here you are, obsessed with romantic language-a language invented for expression between lovers-and you use it to spread animosity.”

“Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.”

“It wasn't as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that...expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation.”