“.....the only sound was of the crickets, and the glittering speckled of stars on the night sky as witness of her biggest mistake, the night when it changed her life forever.”

“Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.”

“Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.”

“People expect you to follow their "rules", to fit in, to be like the others, and when you consciously choose not to and you follow your inner voice, you don't belong there anymore.”

“The phrase ‘separation of church and state,’ which appears in no founding document (only in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson), means that America must never have a state religion, not that the state be indifferent to religion.”

“She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is.”

“[...] what's the use of lying down to die as long as we can stand up and walk.”

“Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.”