Once he saw me, he meandered in my direction and extended his arms for a hug. I slapped him across the face. I hate children.

“Well, you know what they say. The show’s not over until the mockingjay sings,� she said.“The mockingjay?� He laughed. “Really, I think you’re just making these things up.”“Not that one. A mockingjay’s a bona fide bird,� she assured him.“And it sings in your show?� he asked.“Not my show, sweetheart. Yours. The Capitol’s anyway.� pg. 168

“Lucy Gray’s fate was a mystery, then, just like the little girl who shared her name in that maddening song. Was she alive, dead, a ghost who haunted the wilderness? Perhaps no one would ever really know.� pg. 514

“My father shoved aside my bowl of receipts, setting up his things on the bar. “I just want to let you know,� he said, “I call the shots. You sit right there in that chair and I’ll tell you what goes on.�
I looked at him with a growing sense of horror.
“I’m Britney Spears now,� he said.� pg. 182

“The saddest part to me was that what I always wanted was a dad who would love me as I was—somebody who would say, “I just love you. You could do anything right now. I’d still love you with unconditional love.� pg. 23

“Why was it so easy for everyone to forget that I was a human being—vulnerable enough that these headlines could leave a bruise?� pg. 100

"You want to know why I'm crying?" My voice was cracked, my eyes burning. "It's that you think I'm some kind of horrible person just because I wear pants and have a nose ring, and yet you see the girl outside and praise her. That's why I'm crying, Daddy. I'm evolving and changing, just like that girl out there, but you can't see it. You treat me like I'm a prodigal who's turned her back on you. You treat me worse than you treat my pedophile brother." pg. 268

"I was blind to it at the time, but eventually, I would see just how dangerous and toxic IBLP's teachings about authority were in my life." pg. 74

“It seemed to me that he was realizing that he was losing control of me. He’d text verses reminding me to “honor thy father and mother,� and every conversation we had just heaped more guilt on me, leaving fear gripping my throat even tighter. Often he would text me and apologize, but the messages were often followed up by more words condemning our actions or calling us out. His apologies felt insincere and invalid. Hardly a day would go by without some barbed message from him—either directly or from one of my siblings—and it got so that I didn’t want to talk to him anymore." pg. 210

"The problem is that public outrage has a short memory... So rarely do the ramifications of cancel culture extend past an internet connection. And when they do, it is important to remember that they usually result in an incredibly privileged person temporarily experiencing slightly less privilege than they were accustomed to, which is still a very high baseline of privilege compared to the rest of the world. Personally, I long to be a canceled rich man because that is just a vacation." Pg. 78

"I've never understood why when women marry, they're expected to trade in their old names like used cars, losing their last and sometimes even their first - Mrs. John Adams! Mrs. Abe Lincoln - as if their previous identities had just been twenty-odd-year placeholders before they became actual people. Mrs. Peter Dickman. It's like a life sentence. pg. 52

"What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?" pg. 215

"A wife,� he says, “should have no secrets from her husband.�
“I don’t have any secrets,� I tell him.
“The ribbon.�
“The ribbon is not a secret; it’s just mine.�
“A wife should have no secrets.�
My nose grows hot. I do not want to cry.
“Why do you want to hide it from me?�
“I’m not hiding it. It just isn’t yours.� pg. 24

“I drank water and set up my tent and began to make lists. Every teacher beginning with preschool. Every job I’ve ever had. Every home I’ve ever lived in. Every person I’ve ever loved. Every person who has probably loved me. Next week, I will be thirty. The sand is blowing into my mouth, my hair, the center crevice of my notebook, and the sea is choppy and gray. Beyond it, I can see the cottage, a speck on the far shore. I keep thinking I can see the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise. I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.� pg. 48

"It makes me wish you could film a whole entire moment. Not just the visuals and vocals. I want to hold every piece of this. I want to save the details for later: the breeze ruffling my hair through the open car windows, the soft warmth of my flannel. The feeling of being sixteen on a Friday night in September." pg. 238

“They could be like young witches sometimes, his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes. It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.� Pg. 24

"Go chase the moon, tell it your lies." Pg. 36

"God help you, child," she whispers. "If you were mine, I'd never leave you in a house with strangers." pg. 18

"Ah, the women are nearly always rightm all the same," he says. "Do you know what the women have a gift for?"
"What?"
"Eventualies. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what is coming before a man even gets a sniff of it." pg. 38

"Do words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say." pg. 27

"For a start it doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it's simply the fact that you're saying it." pg. 31

"We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?" pg. 63

"You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently." pg. 65

“The garden of Windy Corner was deserted except for a red book, which lay sunning itself upon the gravel path� The sun rose higher on its journey, guided, not by Phaethon, but by Apollo, competent, unswerving, divine. Its rays fell on the ladies whenever they advanced towards the bedroom windows; on Mr. Beebe down at Summer Street as he smiled over a letter from Miss Catharine Alan; on George Emerson cleaning his father’s boots; and lastly, to complete the catalogue of memorable things, on the red book mentioned previously. The ladies move, Mr. Beebe moves, George moves, and movement may engender shadow. But this book lies motionless, to be caressed all the morning by the sun and to raise its covers slightly, as though acknowledging the caress.� pg 166

“What is surprising, in fact, is how little tourism has changed over the past hundred years, once it made the leap from a privileged activity to a mass pursuit. Dean MacCannell, in his classic study of tourism, suggests a neat sociological evolution of travel: “What begins as the proper activity of the hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British �gentleman�), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist)� pg 12

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.� pg 38

“Life, so far as she troubled to conceive it, was a circle of rich, pleasant people, with identical interests and identical foes. In this circle, one thought, married and died. Outside it were poverty and vulgarity for ever trying to enter, just as the London fog tries to enter the pine-woods pouring through the gaps in the northern hills. But, in Italy, where any one who chooses may warm himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished. Her senses expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not particularly high. You jump over them just as you jump into a peasant’s olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to see you. She returned with new eyes.� pg 130

"We had too little time," he says.
She shakes her head.
"We had an eternity. Children and grandchildren."
"I only had you for the blink of an eye," he says.
She laughs.
"You had me for an entire lifetime. All of mine."
"That wasn't enough." pg. 12

The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.� pg. 20

"In Hungary I left my journal with its secret handwriting, and also my first poems. I left my brothers, my parents, without any warning, without saying farewell or goodbye. But above all, that day, that day at the end of November 1956, I lost forever my sense of belonging to a people." pg. 35

"I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don’t know it. I don’t speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries, which I frequently consult. It is for this reason that I also call the French language an enemy language. There is a further reason, the most serious of all: this language is killing my mother tongue." pg. 28

"How many victims did he have on his conscience? Nobody knows. In Romania, the deaths are still being counted; in Hungary, there were thirty thousand in 1956. What we will never be able to measure is the pernicious role the dictatorship exerted on the philosophy, art and literature of the countries of Eastern Europe. By imposing its ideology on these countries, the Soviet Union not only obstructed their economic development, it also tried to stifle their national culture and identity." pg. 31

"What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left my country? More difficult, poorer, I think, but also less solitary, less torn. Happy, maybe." pg. 38

"You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they stay, it's for the same two things...love and gelato."