How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
As Zakariyya and Christoph walked away, she raised the vial and touched it to her lips. "You're famous," she whispered. "Just nobody knows it." (263)
Deborah's touching interaction with a vial of her mother's cells raises an interesting question: what good is immortality? She addresses the question again when she tells Skloot that she wouldn't want to live forever if it meant watching loved ones die. In the end, Deborah believes that her mother's immortality is the best kind: to live on in some form and make the world a better place.
Quote #8
I kept reading: "This is how it will be when the dead are raised to life. When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised, it will be immortal. There is, of course, a physical body, so there has to be a spiritual body." (294)
When cousin Gary shows Skloot passages from the bible that speak about the resurrection body, she starts to get it: the Lacks family sees HeLa cells as Henrietta's resurrected form. Although the scientific community had been throwing the term "immortal" around for decades, there was no sense from them that they meant it in a way meaningful for the people who knew and loved Henrietta. It seems that the Lacks family figured out a way to do this by themselves.
Quote #9
In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without a double, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense. (296)
She's not a Christian believer, but Skloot is able to understand the family's beliefs and see that they absolutely determine how they define Henrietta's immortality.