“Then he recalled whose daughter she was, and wondered why he wondered.Then he recalled who it was who had a child.A child, Noirot had a child!”

“The freest child is the child who is most interested in what he is doing, and at whose hand are the materials for his work or play.”

“He did not know that the child who had asked for yesterday was now seeking to own tomorrow.”

“Step by step she lived over every instant of the time she had been with Robert... She recalled his words, his looks. How few and meager they had been for her hungry heart! ... She wondered when he would come back. He had not said he would come back. She had been with him had heard his voice and touched his hand. But some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico.”

“He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.”

“Unfulfilled WishA woman in Atzbach was murdered by her husband because, in his opinion, she had carried the wrong child with her to safety from their burning house. She had not saved their eight-year old son, for whom the man had special plans, but had saved their daughter, who was not loved by the husband. When the husband was asked, in the District Court in Wels, what plans he had had for his son, who had been completely consumed by the fire, the husband replied that he had intended him to be an anarchist and a mass murderer of dictatorships and thus a destroyer of the state.”