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

“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.”

“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 Unclessomething about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen tablebut those were all imported from the Old Worl...”

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

“I existed in a world that never is , a prison of the mind.”

“It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was...”

“Sanity is over-rated. It lacks color.”

“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.”