“One day, she’d find a way to live her life to the fullest. She was sure of it. She just had no idea how she would manage it.”

“Most of us saw our therapists every day. Cynthia didn’t; she had therapy twice a week and shock therapy once a week. And Lisa didn’t go to therapy. She had a therapist, but he used her hour to take a nap. If she was extremely bored, she’d demand to be taken to his office, where she’d find him snoozing in his chair. “Gotcha!” she’d say. Then she’d come back to the ward. The rest of us traipsed off day after day to exhume the past.”

“No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.”

“She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day to day frustration.”

“How she still thought of Max every day and it was like someone had emptied her lungs of air, and she would catch at her heart, afraid she was dying.”

“And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.”

“How seven days had passed since she had disappeared from existence.
That it would take the eyes of the gods to find her.
Or the heart of the Lumateran exile.”

“There was a certain history to this. While heavily pregnant with Amelia, she had asked him if she was radiant or if she just looked like a waddling duck. He told her she’d looked like a radiant duck. This had not been the correct answer.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“When the music is over, she keeps her head down till she finds her seat again, and I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.”