“Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.”

“I saw a sheet lying on the floor, it must have been a ghost that had passed out… So I kicked it.”

“D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.”

“Those that be washen wyll not take scabbe after (if they haue sufficient meate); for that is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease hym in the mouthe with good meate.”

“When Mian (Dr. Hussain) reached the Rashtrapathi Bhavan after taking oath as President of India, he said that only three rooms out of its 340 sprawling rooms would suffice for his family…when we moved there were my mother, my daughter, Neelofer, some domestic servants, two cows, a parrot and about five thousand books and other household items. Of the three rooms, one was exclusively for him while my mother, my daughter and I stayed in the other room and the third room was used for meeting visitors and for taking food.”

“I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.”

“The Prince then remembered the white-haired Theel in the Castle of Bone, who had also been kind, if a little odd, and he wondered why such nice creatures always seemed to live in bad places with wicked things going on all around them.
“That’s easy,” said the girl, seeming to read his thoughts as the other Theel had done. “The bad places are where we can do the most good.””

“The other night I was lying in bed, looking up at the stars, and I wondered, 'Where the hell is my roof?”

“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college”

“…and worst of all, on June's huge doublebed with the Oriental drapecover on it we had ample room for sometimes six of us to sprawl with coffee cups and ashtrays and discuss the decadence of the 'bourgeoisie' for days on end.”