At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.

My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book. ~Susie's grandmother, Lynn pgs 315-316

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.