“Fourteen hundred and thirty-one.” I blinked. “What's that?” “The year I was born, which is not, as you'll note, yesterday.”

“When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.”

“You're fourteen years old. You've only had that hair for fourteen years and you want to change it already! How bored are you going to be with it by the time you are thirty? What color will you be up to by then?”

“I'm a woman. Forty-five in female years (which is about a hundred and thirty in male years - bastards).”

“But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case, welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life.”

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”