“When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.”

“Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat ... Our words for unhealthy contamination--"soiled" or "dirty"--suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew.”

“Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back. ”

“But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.”

“They count that as your birthday -- the day your mother gets up.""Not the day you were born?"Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth.”

“Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.”

“So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves forever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark”