“Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.”

“Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.""I hope that's not true", I said.”

“The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.”

“Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.”

“I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly”

“I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I'd learned a few from the Uncles—something about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen table—but those were all imported from the Old Wo...”

“...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces....”

“As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.”

“I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.”

“Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.”

“Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.”

“Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again ... we are survivors. If you...”

“Everyone around me was allowed, permitted to fall apart; yet I had to think twice. I couldn't bear to take another dip into an ocean of solitude for another taste of ostracization. I felt I would die.”

“You've been so used to fighting Wars with a gun in your hand that you forget to put it down. Not every fight requires a weapon of some kind, and not everything is a fight.”