“You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.”

“She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns”

“Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.”

“Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.”

“Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.”

“But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”

“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constan...”

“... the effort to discover an authentic self, to strip away layers of alienation and culturally imposed identity and find a soul in a clear, unimpeded communion with the sacred is consonant with sp...”

“I'm a queen with or without a king. Chasing anything is beneath me. Until you're ready to put away childish things and be my man, my king, someone I can trust to shepard my soul to the Almighty I h...”