“If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, 'Let's listen to it on forty-five!' And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.”

“Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.' Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”

“I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon's path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon's light. I didn't know any more, but when I was younger, Iuse to imagine that she was. I'd talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven't done that in a long time, me." -Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden, ch 13, pg 119”

“hi, puppy."she's not a puppy. She's a girl," Nancy's mother says.Nancy pats me and says, "Good puppy. Nice puppy." When he mother bends down to pull her away, she wraps both arms around my legs and wails. "No! My puppy!”

“Women in movies from Hollywood's golden era dressed the way my mother did now. My entire childhood, she'd shown up at PTA meeting in bust-hugging sequins, the sight of which gave my father complicated facial twitches. She was flamboyant, really, in no other way. There was nothing Auntie Mame about her. Unless Auntie Mame had a penchant for public collapse.”

“One of the things I liked about her [Dorothy] was that she had long fingernails that she would carefully manicure and paint to fit her mood. If she were in a happy mood, her nails would be bright red. If she were feeling like she wanted to eviscerate her mother she would paint her nails burgundy.”