Now that I'm here, I've changed because life here is better in all senses.

It's difficult because you really don't have family, your parents, your siblings.

When I came, I just came with money in mind.

These years after my liberation were years of reconstruction, and I think I made the right decisions... I mean, I lost everything: my life; my father died; I didn't know anything about my children.

In the free world, your days pass very quickly because you have so many things to do, and you're in control of your life.

She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to feel more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years.

Shape-shifters lived in a world of color and brightness, of heightened senses. They felt everything more intensely, and so they lived their lives more intensely—anything to make their hearts pound harder. Life could be like a drug.

But how does one wean oneself off life?