“But she had the awful gift of omnipresence, of exercising her influence from a distance; so that while the old family friends and visitors at Longlands said, "It's wonderful, now tactful Blanche is - how she keeps out of the young people's way," every member of the household, from its master to the last boots and scullion and gardener's boy, knew that Her Grace's eyes was on them all.”

“Sophie has a gift," she said. "She has the Sight. She can see what others do not. In her old life she often wondered if she was mad. Now she knows that she is not mad but special.There, she was only a parlor maid, who would likely have lost her position once her looks had faded. Now she is a valued member of our household, a gifted girl with much to contribute.”

“Mma Ramotswe had a gift for the American woman, a basket which on her return journey from Bulawayo she had bought, on impulse, from a woman sitting by the side of the road in Francistown. The woman was desperate, and Mma Ramotswe, who did not need a basket, had bought it to help her. It was a traditional Botswana basket, with a design worked into the weaving."These little marks here are tears," she said. "The giraffe gives its tears to the women and they weave them into the basket."The American woman took the basket politely, in the proper Botswana way of receiving a gift with both hands. How rude were people who took a gift with one hand, as if snatching it from the donor; she knew better.You are very kind, Mma," she said. "But why did the giraffe give its tears?"Mma Ramotswe shrugged; she had never thought about it. "I suppose that it means that we can all give something," she said. "A giraffe has nothing else to give--only tears." Did it mean that? she wondered. And for a moment she imagined that she saw a giraffe peering down through the trees, its strange stilt-borne body among the leaves; and its moist velvet cheeks and liquid eyes; and she thought of all the beauty that there was in Africa, and of the laughter, and the love. The boy looked at the basket. "Is that true, Mma?"Mma Ramotswe smiled. "I hope so," she said.”

“Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.”

“What's yer name?" he demanded.The girl searched for a name. "Stella," she said at last, because she had the stars at her fingertips and she had been studying maps of the sky and she was someone else now, not the girl she had been in Ballarat where her grandfather had pointed out the planets and named them, and not the girl she had been in Melbourne, and she certainly didn't want to be the girl she was at her Brisbane school. She was reinventing herself."No it's not," the boy said. "You're new. Where're ya from?""I'm Stella," she said stubbornly. "I'm from the moon. You wanna look?”

“She knew things that nobody had ever told her... She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pastor of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one every sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.”