Mrs. da Souza Quotes

“Her anger had begun with the failure of the mountain, but had grown so great that it no longer needed reasons to overspill. (‘She is not angry with you,’ their father used to whisper to Maro and Inez last thing at night. But it was sometimes hard to believe.)

″‘Couldn’t Great-Grandma have used the names again, once the children were dead?’ asked Inez, being practical. ‘And how would brother and sister be told apart in Heaven, may I ask? And the bad luck! Consider the bad luck!‘”

“Inez thought [the Baby] must be searching for a name, since Mrs. da Souza would not give it one. Mrs. da Souza considered it a waste to name a child before knowing whether it would survive.”

“Picked in a rage, her salads contained increasingly strange ingredients: nettles and geraniums, gum wrappers blown off the street, clothes pegs fallen off the washing line.”