“I grew up in an apartment that would have made a trailer look really decadent and nice. Pretty much the only dependable thing I had was books.”

“If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.”

“The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would...”

“Eleanor West spent her days giving them what she had never had, and hoped that someday, it would be enough to pay her passage back to the place where she belonged.”