“I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!”

“May your heart be mine, may my heart be yours. May your sorrows be mine, may my joys be yours.”

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on t...”

“The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.”

“Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the hear...”

“I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.”

“There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology.”

“The girl Id been just an hour ago was gone; shed been obliterated. I had no idea who I was, now.”

“I felt numb, I felt empty. I was a shell, an abandoned chrysalis, a tomb lying in wait for the dead”

“Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.”

“They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and ...”

“With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the cr...”