“I used to cringe when people said I looked like him—my father, because I was a girl and girls aren’t supposed to look like their fathers. Girls are supposed to look like their mothers, or fairy princesses, or Barbie dolls, or some crap like that.”
“Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince;
For she did print your royal father off,
Conceiving you: were I but twenty-one,
Your father’s image is so hit in you,
His very air, that I should call you brother”
“It is yours;
And, might we lay the old proverb to your charge,
So like you, ‘tis the worse. Behold, my lords,
Although the print be little, the whole matter
And copy of the father, eye, nose, lip,
The trick of’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley,
The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek,
His smiles”
“Looking on the lines
Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d,
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous”
“Their beautiful mother’s mouth, Estha thought. Ammu’s mouth.
That had kissed his hand through the barred train window. First class, on the Madras Mail to Madras.
‘Bye Estha, Godbless, Ammu’s mouth had said. Ammu’s trying-not-to-cry mouth.
The last time he had seen her.”
“She glared, daring us to pay her a compliment. But the cat had our tongues. Mary Alice stared up at her, transfixed. Was she seeing herself fifty years hence? ”
“Her great trial in life was her name, for she was a red-haired stoutish child and bore no resemblance to a lily of any kind or a rose unless it were a cabbage one, but, as she sometimes sighed, she supposed it might have been worse.”