“It first happened the winter after she turned sixteen. The language that had pricked and confined her like clothing made from a thousand needles abruptly disappeared.”
“I thought of the face of the Virgin Mother in scenes of the Annunciation, and had a new understanding of her inward gaze, at once present and far away.”
“She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld. She would refuse to die young and would live, instead, to be impossibly, defiantly old.”
