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

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?

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.

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.