“Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.”

“That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.”

“When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them tostop fighting?”

“Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.”

“You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.”