“When she had done her work, she would go over to the chimney corner, and sit among the cinders.”

“When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.”

“Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.”

“She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.”

“The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.”

“For himself, he had never thought it would be this bad. He had stopped remembering her, except maybe ten times a day, but now she came to him and the forgetting would have to be done all over again.”

“She sat quietly in one corner of the sofa, the end of her sari drawn modestly over her hair. Like the motionless illusion of a madly spinning top, she was staring vacantly into space.”

“My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions -- she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband and chosen my father--but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope. Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, although she can't have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent; and she was always depressed.”

“If night were a thief, it would be steal my happiness or my dreams of life. Maybe she doesn't know that I don't have anything special that she can steal. He finds nothing under my pillow except my sorrows.
If she looks around, she would have found a shining chest kept in a dark corner, when she open it, she would find nothing but my loneliness. she had to go empty handed with remorse.”

“She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”