“A couple of weeks ago, the 21-year-old was photographed with her feet up while watching a colleague playing in an international exhibition match in Perth, and the proximity of her toes to a nearby Indian flag raised temperatures in her home state to vindaloo levels.”

“A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.”

“For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values — or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be — to be through her son, to live through her son.”

“Even a queen stubs her toe, but a wise woman watches the path.”

“a woman's place is in the kitchen… sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner.”

“Maybe you should go home and rest," Simon told Meg. Maybe he could go home with her and they could cuddle for a while or play a game. Or she could watch a movie with him and pet him.”

“Just leave her alone. You're annoying her.'
'I'm not annoying her. She doesn't even know how to be annoyed. She's, what, a week old?'
'She's three months.'
'She's three months in our years, but what is she in baby years?”

“My father’s mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico’s independence from France. They’d taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she’d astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks.”

“I muttered a swear word to myself. After I heard Angel cussing like a sailor when she stubbed her toe, my new resolution was to watch my language. All I needed was a six-year-old mutant with a potty mouth”

“And the look on her face as she opened the door
Was like an old joke told by a friend.
It'd taken ten more years but she'd found her smile
And I watched the corners start to bend.”