“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beati...”

“It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.”

“I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.”

“An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot”

“Stability and security are just illusions. But they are necessary illusions because without them there would be no way of going on.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”