"You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled - not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did."

"Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency."

"He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he'd used with Kendra, says, 'If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash'--he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice--'or big-ass queer'--now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice--'I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them."

"Often we may even smile or laugh at adversity, but all people share the same passions. They are merely manifest differently according to one's culture and conditioning."

"I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heirloom tomatoes, and I do have that dream. It would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I do love my work."

"Wives?' she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, 'None active,' as if wives were volcanoes."

"I can’t take back the past, Nadya. Not even we Unicorns can do that. But I’ll be damned if someone else is going to control our future. I’ve been away for too long, and I will always regret not being there for the Rourakin. But I have returned, and I am not leaving again."