"Dreams can make you so scared or addled or miserable that you'll do whatever you have to just to be free of them." p. 2

"I found out that once you're in junior high, you're too big for lots of the stuff you used to do before." p. 10

"Why I thought I could do French when I can't hardly speak my own language is more than I can say." p. 19

"Seeing him like that, trying so hard to do something so simple, gave me a funny feeling inside." p. 37

"Sometimes Maxine says things the rest of us would life to say but can't, because of our jobs and our children." p. 51

"Two boys, I thought, alike and not alike, both missing their mothers." p. 59

"It was okay for girls to want to do well at school, but not for boys; they weren't supposed to care." p. 70

"'They couldn't take...