I love this book so much. I couldn‘t put it down. I wanted to cancel all my plans to finish reading it. Isabel Allende is one of my favorite writers.

A great book about the history of cults, coercion persuasion techniques used and deprogramming. I recommend this book if you want to understand how cults recruit their members and how to get out of one.

I enjoyed reading all the interviews. I loved this book.

Im still grateful to her, but after I graduated I didn‘t go back. I‘m not in the habit of returning to those I‘ve left. Donatella Di Pietrantonio from A Girl Returned

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

“Do you know what they say? The world is like a cucumber. Today it‘s in your hand, tomorrow it‘s up in your ass.”

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn‘t time for anything else.

This is what most girls are taught — that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it‘s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.” (p. 13)

I know that wholeness is not everything and that if you will give an eye for a prize you‘ll be a sure winner.
Dallas Wiebe from the short story “Night Flight to Stockholm.”

But my nineteen-year-old self would correct the court: "understanding" love is for later, "understanding" love verges on practicality, "understanding" love is for when the heart has cooled. (Page 110-111)

“To know anything you have to know everything..” Robert Gottlieb