"I don't know if you realize how advanced I am for my age? I think it's because I have three older sisters, and so I've grown up quick. I knew how to read before I even started school!"

"But [the rabbit] wouldn't budge! She was used to her little pen. I kept slapping her, harder each time, until she started whimpering like a scared child. I was the one hurting her, insisting she be free. Silly bunny, I thought. You're nothing at all like me."

"A young man was staring down at me, his face alluring in the same animal way as his feet. . . . Underneath his thin guayabera, I could see the muscles of his broad shoulders shifting as he reached down and gave me a wad of bills to put in the poor box as his donation. . . . I had seen the next best thing to Jesus, my earthly groom."

"I felt my breath coming short again. At first, I had thought it was caused by the cotton bandages I had started tying around my chest so my breasts wouldn't grow. I wanted to be sure what had happened to Lina Lovaton would never happen to me. But every time I'd hear one more secret about Trujillo, I could feel the tightening in my chest even when I wasn't wearing the bandages."

"Sor Asuncion comes right out and says your older sister has been caught sneaking out of school. Then, before I can even put that in my head, she asks me if our Tio Mon, who lives in La Vega, is ill, yes or no. I take one look at Minerva's sick-looking face and I nod yes, our Tio Mon is ill, and then I invent with sarampion [measles], last I heard."

"Now, after thirty-four years, the commemorations and interviews and presentations of posthumous honors have almost stopped, so that for months at a time, [______] is able to take up her own life again. But she's long since resigned herself to Novembers. Every year as the 25th rolls around, the television crews drive up."

"That moment, I understood her hatred. My family had not been personally hurt by Trujillo, just as before losing my baby, Jesus had not taken anything away from me. But others had been suffering great losses."

“Right then, I told Sinita everything I knew about bleeding and having babies between your legs. She was pretty shocked, and beholden. She offered to trade me back the secret of Trujillo.”

"Cousin Berto is so dear. His older brother Raul, too, but Berto is especially special-minded, if that is a word."

“The interview woman stops before the portraits, and _______ waits for her to ask which one was which or how old they were when these were taken, facts ______ has at the ready, having delivered them so many times.”

“And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside of me.”

"I studied them. . . . Four girls, I checked, three in panties, and the baby naked. One time, I stopped at the side of the road and stared at their Mirabal eyes. "Who is your father?" I asked point blank."

"The [letter] lit up. Ashes fluttered like moths . . . Looking at the mirror, she was surprised by the wild look on her face. The ring on her finger flashed a feverish reminder. She brushed her hair up into a tight ponytail and put on her nightgown."

"If I were to say 'tennis shoes,' you'd know we were talking about ammunition. The 'pineapples' for the picnic are the grenades. 'The goat must die for us to eat at the picnic.' (Get it? It's like a trick language.)"

"[Trujillo] yanks me by the wrist, thrusting his pelvis at me in a vulgar way, and I can see my hand in an endless slow motion rise—a mind all its own—and come down on the astonished, made-up face."

"At fourteen, I went away to Inmaculada Conception, and all the country people around here thought I was entering the convent. "What a pity," they said, "such a pretty girl."

"I don't want to be babied anymore. I want to be worthy of Palomino. Suddenly, all the boys I've known with soft hands and easy lives seem like the pretty dolls I've outgrown and passed on to Minou."

“It was after my conference with Sor Asuncion, once I had begun praying to know my calling, that suddenly, like a lull in the storm, the cravings stopped. All was quiet. I slept obediently through the night, but I was not sure who had won.”