“My fear for you outweighs my fear of him, he said simply. And I told you, didnt I? If you left, Id follow you.But should you try to leave on your own, know that I will go to the ends of the earth t...”

“the longer you silence a violin, the harder it is for it to find its true voice again.”

“Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder.”

“Like any girl, she still felt the echoes from earlier eras of repression. She'd been raised by a mother who'd fought hard to get a wage she deserved, to have access to education when she lacked eve...”

“What mattered was that these beliefs had swept through the souls of everyone else like a plague. He couldn't see the end of it. Even a hundred years in the future, he knew, the roots still had not ...”

“Etta saw the way Sophia took a deep breathe, set her shoulders back, and moved with practiced grace on her way out and she understood something about the other girl, truly understood for the first...”

“Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder.”

“How do you fight against a mountain? How do you move it when you don't even have a shovel? Maybe you don't have to move it, Etta said, folding the gown over the lid of the trunk. Maybe you have to ...”

“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other...”

“Every traveler should make their own observation.”

“If perception is limited by experience, knowledge, and/or education, what deems my actions correct or my thoughts as moral?”

“Love and a red rose can't be hid.”

“Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.”

“I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”