“My mom insisted on saying such things, even though almost no one understood what she meant. My Dad sometimes called her Addlebrain because she read so many books.”

“The fact that one of these ladies was my mom made me particularly sad because my mom is beautiful. And she’s always on a diet. Sometimes, my dad calls her beautiful, but she cannot hear him.”

“Two days after my dad's funeral, my mom went on a mission. I never understood it until then--that sometimes a spy doesn't need a cover so much as she needs a shield.”

“It's not a cat!' Flo insisted. 'It's a horrible stripy- thing - and it's got fangs, and... and...''She calls it Henry,' she said, as though this was calling the Prince of Darkness Fred. 'She says her sister left it to her in her. In her will!”

“And then she began to think about Lady Glencora herself. What a strange, weird nature she was,—with her round blue eyes and wavy hair, looking sometimes like a child and sometimes almost like an old woman! And how she talked! What things she said, and what terrible forebodings she uttered of stranger things that she meant to say!”

“But in that moment when my brother took the field, all that washed away, and everyone was proud... I looked up at my dad, and he was smiling. I looked at my mom, and she was smiling even though she was nervous about my brother getting hurt, which was strange because it was a VCR tape of an old game, and she knew he didn't get hurt.”