There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.