“We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines- especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.”
“Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbours’ quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had and then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage”
″ ‘What a lucky day this is!’ thought Sylvester. ‘From now on I can have everything I want. My father and mother can have anything they want. My relatives, my friends, and anybody at all can have everything anybody wants!’ ”
“I looked at the long dirt road that crawled across the plains, remembering the morning that Mama had died, cruel and sunny. They had come for her in a wagon and taken her away to be buried. And then the cousins and aunts and uncles had come and tried to fill up the house. But they couldn’t.”
“A mysterious visitor rescues him from his relatives and takes him to his new home, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
After a lifetime of bottling up his magical powers, Harry finally feels like a normal kid. But even within the Wizarding community, he is special.”
“Unfortunately the holiday turns out rather less lovely than Mum hoped. Marooned in a remote village with Auntie Joan, Uncle Peter and her dreadful cousin Robert (inventor of the patent caterpillar trap) and their garden full of domineering vegetables.”
Journey to the River Sea is the story of Maia whose parents are tragically killed abroad. ... Together with her new governess, Miss Minton, they travel to Brazil to start their new lives but are disappointed to find that their relatives, the Carters, do not want Maia but do want the allowance that comes with her.
Journey to the River Sea is about orphaned London schoolgirl, Maia, who, accompanied by her strict but kind governess, is sent to live with her ghastly relatives in South America. Unlike her nature-phobic relatives, Maia loves her exotic, colourful new world.
Her hair falls out. She makes a friend, Ayse, who later dies from radiation poisoning. Her aunt from Hamburg finds her and tells her that her parents and youngest brother, who had been with them, are dead. The news was intended to be kept secret.
“They brought photographs as well. Silly pictures of themselves with her mother and father. On excursions, in boats and cars, at parties, on beaches. Squinting, unrecognizable faces, in which they expected her to be interested, when in fact they took her own image of them away from her.”
“Of course, many friends and relations might just as well not be there for all the good they do anybody. But most people have a few nice ones. Peter and Santa had nobody.”