“I realized that I had to rebuild my foundation. I had a choice about how to see my life: I could look only at the negative or I could emphasise the positive. It took all the energy I could muster to accept that my miscarriage had happened for a reason.”

“All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”

“I never reasoned on what I should do, but what I had done; as if my Reason had her eyes behind, and could only see backwards.”

“Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my very existence. I would see that I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive. For a long time I wouldn’t be ready to accept that my worldview could be wrong, but I do not look back with shame at my ignorance.”

“I knew at that moment I had to make a choice... I could submit to everything and live a life of excuses, or I could push myself... I could push myself and make my life good...”

“I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book.”