“A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.”

“I wonder if there's a difference between being a dutiful mother and being a good mother.'There is,' I said, and Charlotte looked up at me, expectant. Even if I couldn't articulate the difference as an adult, as a child I had felt it. I thought for a moment. 'A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes,' I said. And a good mother?'I lifted my gaze to Charlotte's. 'Is someone whose child wants to follow her.”

“A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.”

“It could not have been easy for Mother, an only child, to grow up without a father and with a mother who was remote. Photos of her as a child show her extremely dressed up --Cornie's beautiful little doll. But a daughter, unlike a doll, grows up, and might fall in love with and marry someone her mother does not like; she becomes an individual with her own ideas.”

“I took a step. And then another. And so it went as we followed Father, who had come to take us forever away from Salem. And with every step I thought of my mother's courage as she faced her judges. With every step I thought of her cleaving to the truth even as she fell the short distance of the rope. With every step I thought of her pride, her strength, her love.And with every step I thought, I am my mother's daughter, I am my mother's daughter...”

“Never argue with a mother who's scolding her child.”