• 2+2. But what is 2? Where is it?
• "D-o-g" spells dog. But "dog" isn't a real dog. "Dog" is a word someone made up. So why can't "D-o-g" spell cat, if you want it to? I learned to grow masks for school. I had to be careful there. Covering up was like instinct, though. Like a brown walking stick turning green when it sits on a leaf. Watch. Watch. Watch. Watch hands. Watch lips. Watch eyebrows. Watch the paths that come down beside noses and curve out and around. I grew masks like extra thumbs. Like a flower sprouting the wrong blossoms. I had learned a lot from insects about how to live around people. I had learned a lot from growing up in the shadow of slavery. Slaves had to have six senses. They had to pay attention to small things, to small routines, to other people's view of things. They were always strangers, ready for the next trauma."

pg. 98

• If we were city people, and if we weren't all neurologically challenged. If we had recovered enough from our shell shock to organize. To get signatures and get it in the newspaper. Those kinds of things. I suppose the schoolhouse would be a historic property by now.

pg. 89

• During some of those visits, I saw weakened spirits beginning to detach themselves from bodies, and I saw struggles to hold on. I saw terror in people's faces. I saw pain in their bones and in the tunnels inside their marrow. I saw overwhelming longings. I heard the sounds of butterfly wings brushing against each other, the noise of ripping, like the tearing of cloth. Butterflies spread out in my mind like dark flocks of sparrows when light is slowly leaving dark-blue skies. I whispered to them, as their wings reached out to touch me-- me, a child. As their fragile weights pressed against me to save them, to forgive them, to take and keep some private part of them, breathing. All I could ever do was whisper. I felt guilty that I couldn't do more. Couldn't save them. And I felt angry that I had been asked to. I wanted to go back home."

pg. 53

• The jars of jam sang and talked to me. They mesmerized me with the colors of their light. I spent hours with the pantry door closed, listening to them, watching them, being soothed. One of my favourite things to do was to watch flecks of dust floating in streaks of light or sunshine. They seemed so magical... Sometimes I would close my eyelashes just a little and make everything rainbows. In the pantry, light came through the cracks in the door. The door was made of vertical rows of boards, painted light yellow on the outside, like washed-out mustard, like saffron or daffodils mixed with cream.

pg. 43

• I saw their spirits all the time. Walking in the yard. Sitting under the elm tree. Sometimes I would go and sit with them, to feel their quietness. It was like falling into a soft blanket. Into the space where no one blinked, no one breathed.

pg. 38

• My whole life I had thought that I was from another planet, that someday the ship would come for me and take me home. I believed that most other people were insane and that I was one of the rare sane ones. Who else but crazy people would make a world that moved too fast to keep up? What sane people would make a world that left so little room for quiet, for thinking, for kindness, beauty, or grace? In what sane world would there have been slavery?

pg. 12

• I grew up on a plantation, in a family where almost everyone had neurological disorders. In some ways, though, this combination has helped to save me. Although I was more eccentric than anyone else in my family, I was still familiar. I still made sense to them. They could understand some of my dysfunctions, because they had them to a lesser degree themselves. They very patiently taught me many simple things about how to get along. How to create a habit and live by it. How to deflect sounds. How to guess what people wanted. Some of those things were what had helped slaves to survive. How to make a mask. How to scream silently.

pg. 20

• I'm telling you my stories because I have to... I have to organize the few things I remember. Maybe I won't forget them if I hear them being told. I'm telling you because I want to put my mind on display, like a painting on a wall. I want to share it the way you share things by talking to each other. This is the only way I know of doing that. The sharing is more the point than the stories. The way that I remember is more the point than the memories.

pg.23