“That whole week Baby Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversations, and whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which was deducted at source. From their pocket money. She made them write lines – “impositions” she called them – I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English. A hundred times each.”
″‘Jacob have I loved …’ Suddenly my stomach flipped. Who was speaking? I couldn’t remember the passage. Was it Isaac, the father of the twins? No, even the Bible said that Isaac had favored Esau. Rebecca, the mother, perhaps? It was her conniving that helped Jacob steal the blessing from his brother. Rebecca—I had hated her from childhood, but somehow I knew that these were not her words...”
“What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself. ”
“The Matheson twins. You haven’t heard? They wandered away from their father into the bush. Only three they are. Rachel and Theo Matheson. They’ll freeze to death, the poor little lambs.”
″‘Twins,’ he murmured, ‘twins’. He touched their red hair. ‘Yes, yes, our colour’. He looked into their minds. ‘And with the gift. They will be the ones.‘”
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”
“Kestrel watched, proud and full of wonder. Even though she was Bowman’s twin and sometimes felt as close to him as if they shared the same body, she didn’t understand this trick he had of going into people’s feelings. But she loved him for it.”
“If there were no walls to shut out the sea, the whole country would be covered with water; and if that were so, then there wouldn’t be any Holland, or any Holland Twins, or any story.”
“You were supposed to be safe in Mallard-that strange, separate town- hidden amongst your own. But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant that white men could kill you for refusing to die. The Vignes twins were reminders of this, tiny girls in funeral dresses who grew up without a daddy because white men decided that it would be so.”
“Twins Nicola and Lawrie arrive at their new school determined to do even better than their distinguished elder sisters, but things don’t turn out quite as planned.”
If there ever were a pair of twins in danger of being utterly spoiled by adoration, it was these prattling Brookes. Of course they were the most remarkable children ever born, as will be shown when I mention that they walked at eight months, talked fluently at twelve months, and at two years they took their places at table, and behaved with a propriety which charmed all beholders.