“Incongruity, they say, is one of the main ingredients of humor. Maybe it's because everybody can feel superior to me. I honestly don't know.”

“I'm thinking about the cat dying, Dulcie and her knife against my throat, Mrs Irvin and her St Thomas bone... But never my sister. A brother rarely thinks about his sister.”

“I was tired of her getting away with being so young.”

“My sister is my little star, and I'm excited for her and proud of her. With her, I'm protective, but also I don't want to be that sister who's really pushy and thinks they know everything and makin...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“Nothing is what one thinks it is. Cloth is stone and circus is an art. There are no certainties.”

“Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent.”

“When we realize that we are not the mind, we do not exist as a labled person. We also experience all circus around us does not exist either.”