Quotes from Patricia McCormick

A man who doles out sweets, and slaps, with the same hand.

Sometimes when we're in situations where we feel we're not in control, we do things, especially things that take a lot of energy, as a way of making ourselves feel we have some power.

This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama's face, our family's future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

You show you care, you die.You show you fear, you die.You show nothing, maybe you live.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil," he would later write. "Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."2

Each year, nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families, intentionally o r unwittingly, into a life of sexual slavery in the brothels of India. W orldwide , the U.S. State D epartmen t estimates that nearly half a millio n children are trafficked into the sex trade annually.

I ask Ama why. "Why," I say, "must women suffer so?" "This has always been our fate," she says. "Simply to endure," she says, "is to triumph.

To be faithful, he wrote, a person had to be concerned less about himself and more about caring for his neighbor.

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.

At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.

All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don't die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don't have to fight. I don't have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.

But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.

she is bent under the weight of her burden

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew

But sometimes, I hate myself for hating him. Simply because he is an ordinary boy.

Trying to remember, I have learned , is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the mons

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew.

This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombs—the ones who would be born only to be buried next season.

Four other babies were born between me and my brother. There are no notches for them.

This has always been our fate," she says. "Simply to endure," she says, "is to triumph.

I don't know what this is, this Revolution. But I think maybe this guy not too smart. The rich, they chase you if you steal their things. Poor people, they the one who share.   Three

Wenn ich jetzt falle, stehe ich nie wieder auf. Also gehe ich weiter.