“But my mother was aglow. She had a continuing fascination with celebrities, and now she had one of her own. She was never moved by what I was doing (in an interview she said, "He writes his own material, I’m always telling him he needs a new writer")…”

“He said, and his voice was strained as if he had had a mortal wound, 'Gwenhwyfar-' He so seldom spoke her formal name, it was always my lady or my queen, or when he spoke to her in play it was always Gwen. When he spoke it now, it seemed to her she had never heard a sweeter sound. 'Gwenhwyfar. Why do you weep?'Now she must lie, and lie well, because, she could not in honor tell him the truth. She said, 'Because-' and stopped, and then, in a choking voice, she said, 'because I do not know how I shall live if you go away.”

“When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail Danilovich (that was the name of his regular doctor). 'Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm doing entirely for my own sake,' she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it was hard to disentangle anything from it. Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her own sake as something so incredible that he would take it as meaning the opposite.”

“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…”

“He offered her the world. She said she had her own.”

“Who thinks to interview their own mother? As a self-fixated teen, I never imagined that she had an actual personal history. To my young eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering”