“Once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.”

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Source: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 12

Source: UnWholly

Source: The Awakening

Source: Gadis Pantai

Source: Sisterhood Everlasting

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Context: He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

Source: Fire and Hemlock (1985), p. 14.