“While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings.”

“My father was a history professor, and my mother a housewife—"

She married a house?”

“My mother wasnʹt sleeping with anybody. She doesnʹt even sleep with my father.”

“I'll never forget my first time with you' Min said as she edged the doughnut off her finger. 'The earth moved, and then my mother asked my father who he was going down on at lunch.”

“My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris
Smuggling bombs for the underground.
And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence;
He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.”

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”

“My father insisted that the boys in my life were directly responsible for my juvenile-delinquent tendencies.
My mother, more accurately, assumed that I was the bad influence.”

“Music is my mother and my father; it is my work and my rest… my blood… my compass… my love…”

“You should always cook eggs slowly" was Joan's advice in the kitchen on 118th Street. Joan did everything slowly, Edie reflected; she spoke, walked, dressed and read slowly, as if savoring every moment. She read everything, every newspaper and magazine. She liked the cartoons of William Steig in The New Yorker, particularly the one of the dejected fellow saying, "My mother loved me but she died." Joan didn't get along with her mother, and felt that she had nothing in common with her parents' country-club existence. She had rebelled against her background by living the New York City bohemian life.”

“My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt.”