Quotes from Patricia McCormick

Simply to end ure," she says, "is to triumph.

I nod yes-no-yes-no and run back to Ama, afraid to tell her about this new auntie who smells of amber and jasmine and possibility.

Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don't expect anything, you don't get disappointed.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

Simply to endure is to triumph.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

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

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

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.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

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

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.

Guard the portals of your mind.

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don't understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.

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.

People who aren't asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills- even the substance- abuse guests.

My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Then I placed the blade next to the skin on my palm. A tingle arched across my scalp. The floor tipped up at me and my body spilled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next...

A KIND OF ILLNESS This ache in my chest is a relentless thing, worse than any fever. A fever is gone with a few of Mumtaz's white pills. But this illness has had me in its grip for a week now. This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.

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

Most of all, I am afraid of life outside this place

Back at the hut, all my sister, they start to cry. "No crying," my aunt says, very strict. "You cry only in your mind." But later, when everyone else asleep, I hear my aunt, her tears, they fall like rain.