“Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's stillbanging Charles after all these years —""Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.”

“But he didn’t seem surprised to see her. ‘Hey.’‘Hey, yourself.’ Okay, that was stupid. Her grandmother used to say Hey, yourself. Great, she was turning into her grandmother at the most inopportune time. She didn’t want to sound like a well-adjusted sixty-year-old.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, running around, not married, staying out all night. Ashamed!" "Ashamed!" my grandmother echoed. Good to know they still agreed on things after forty-three years of marriage.”

“If you know somebody very well, like your grandmother or your baby sister, you will know when they are real and when they are fake.”

“I just want her to know that she's still beautiful, after all these years, and that I'm here - always,”

“Such was the love of this grandson for his grandmother that two years after the death of his mother, when she herself fell gravely ill, he vowed to her that someday he would try to tell the world her life story.'But why?' she asked humbly. 'I'm no one, just a girl from the coast''But you are everyone, Grandma,' the young Pramoedya told her. 'You are all the people who have ever had to fight to make this life their own.”