I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, now get up and do what your mother says.

On the wall next to the table, next to the scones that provided each table with its own circle of lamplight were quotations about reading, her favorite of which was from Kafka: 'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

On Jesus: "Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people.

I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, now get up and do what your mother says.

Mother always said she was a size 7 woman she kept wrapped in fat to prevent bruising.

My hair looks like it had been purchased at a rummage sale after all the real hair was gone.