“Aren't you going to answer it?" Lopez asked."I'm afraid it's my mother," I said."She calls on Sundays?""No, she calls whenever things are going badly.”

“Mother! Katie remembered. She had called her own mother "mama" until the day she had told her that she was going to marry Johnny. She had said, "Mother, I'm going to marry..." She had never said "mama" after that. She had finished growing up when she stopped calling her mother “mama.” Now Francie…”

“I'm not calling you that," she announced flatly. "It's too weird. I'm going to call you Carl." "I don't want you to call me Carl." "That's interesting, Carl," said Angela, cheering up.”

“Why do you persist in being so frivolous, Urgit?""Why don't we just call it a symptom of my incipient madness?""You're not going to go mad," she said firmly."Of course I'm going to go mad, mother. I'm rather looking forward to it.”

“What's Optimism?' asked Cacambo. 'I'm afraid to say,' said Candide, 'that it's a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”

“She considered, maybe for the first time, how lucky she was to be able to pick up the phone and call her mother whenever she needed bad advice.”