I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.

Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.

The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.