What is assumed to bring happiness and fulfillment often brings the greatest pain. (Epilogue) - Nina Graboi

The political atmosphere was heating up. In Germany, Hitler blared his message of the super race and of hatred for the Jews into Aryan ears. In Italy, Mussolini dosed dissenters with castor-oil. (Chapter Four)

We are growing, becoming more spiritual, these men said. Could the drugs help us, who are now located between the animals and the angels, to one day leave our larval state and become butterflies? With all my heart I wanted to believe in our potential to evolve, to emerge from our brutish past. (Chapter Twenty-two)

The one bond of love that seems inalienable is that of a mother to her child. Motherhood is one of the greatest blessings in life, I had always been told. And in many ways, it is. That it is also one of the heaviest burdens is kept secret from one generation to the next. The charming smiles, the adorable gurglings of your infant son or daughter are paid for with sleepless nights, and later with the inevitable clashes between you and your growing child. "Little children, little worries. Big children, big worries," isn't that how the saying goes? Yet so strong is the imperative of nature that women uncomplainingly carry out this task and hand down the myth of the joys of motherhood to their unsuspecting daughters. Today I know that the unconditional love a mother is supposed to bear her child is as much of a fable as that child's unconditional love for her. There is as much ambivalence in the mother-child relationship as with the rest of the family members. The nuclear family, so vital to the well-being of the growing child, is also the breeding ground for the psychological damage that characterizes so much of today's civilized society. By the time I was in my thirties I had already seen through these myths. (Chapter Twenty-two)