But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.