“Wisdom's daughter walks alone—”
“Ella!” Frank stood suddenly. “Maybe it's not the best time—”Ella continued, cupping her hands over her ears and raising her voice.”

“Andrea raised her hand. “This is the hand that slapped Aunt B.”
“Maybe you should have it gold-plated.”
“Here, you can touch it, since you’re my best friend.”

“Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.”

“Then he raised her enough to whisper in her ear, and while his voice was tender, his words were savage. "You're my woman, and no man or God or ghost will ever take you from me.”

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”

“No, you won her over. Gave up everything for her. Maybe that's the only way to convince her you love her.”

“The name she gave was Caroline
Daughter of a miner
Her ways were free
It seemed to me
That sunshine walked beside her”

“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”

“Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.”

“I recall some years ago this mother and son in California who was very angry and stomped out of the meeting and I did not see her again because I said it was the duty of Christian parents to have their child in the Christian school. And she went on about how wonderful their church was, and how marvelous the youth was, and her daughter had the best kind of Christian training imaginable and she was a good witness at school. And I never saw her again but I heard from her about six, seven years later when she called me weeping. Did I know a school that would take her daughter because her daughter was now into demonism, she was out sometimes for two or three nights, was into drugs and promiscuity, if the mother tried to say anything to her the girl thought nothing about pulling a knife and backing the mother against the wall with a knife against her throat and threatening her life. And she wanted to know if there was a Christian school in town, in particular, and I told her it would take a full time guard to stand over your daughter every moment, and she wanted, she felt that it was unchristian that they wouldn’t take her daughter. And I reminded her of her stand a few years back, when she continued to whine and feel sorry for herself, someone was going to take the mess she had created and hand her back her daughter, perhaps to stick her back in the public schools again.”