“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.”

“My father was a proctologist; my mother was an abstract artist. That's how I view the world.”

“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.”

“In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I learned the right way to live from my parents. I never heard any hate in my house. I never heard my father say a mean word to my mother, or my mother to my father, either. During the war, when food was hard to get, my parents fed their children first and they ate what was left. They always thought of us.”

“This is so cool,” I said as Dad walked away. “Have you met the tattoo artist? Is he hot?
“He’s a she,” Mom said.
“Is she hot? Cause I’m still young, you know. My sexual identity isn’t fully formed.”

“When my brother… was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father, a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: "Just my luck!" he would say. "What a pity she was not born a man!" But then I gradually realized that people were saying "It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good," and since then I have avoided writing the simplest [Chinese] character. My handwriting is appalling.”