She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

Honesty. And I just really think there's a fundamental friendship that needs to exist, whether it's a lover, whether it's a sister...there's just this connection both people need to be effortlessly themselves.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

...there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The higher you go, the fewer women there are.