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“How did she get so powerful?” she asked, trying to be kind. “She had two good parents.”
He didn’t answer this.

… “flavor”?!?!
WHY AMERICAN SPELLING IN AUSTRALIAN-PUBLISHED BOOKS?!

Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: […] It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation.
“I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.”

“Peter was supposed to come into the world this way,” she said. “He is a gift from God, and God gives His gifts in whatever way He chooses.”

The skill I was learning was a crucial one: the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Agnes looks at him and he looks back at her. She wants, more than anything, to stretch this moment, to expand the time before he knows, to shield him from what has happened for as long as she can. Then she gives a swift, single, downward nod.

[…]phenomenon of moviegoing […] called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighbourhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand […]. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighbourhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

For context, this book was first published in 1960, and the narrator is currently in New Orleans just before Mardi Gras.
“A krewe is a group of people who get together at Carnival time and put on a parade and a ball. Anyone can form a krewe. Of course there are famous old krewes […], but there are also dozens of others. The other day a group of Syrians from Algiers formed a krewe named Isis.”

Later I will cry and cry in great hollow howls. Later I will understand what it is to keen, to feel a crazed, dark sound emerging from the deep, hard, rock fields inside my body. […] Later I will learn that grief is so physical it makes you walk differently. Later I will begin to grieve, and it will last for many years. But I still have a few hours before that has to begin.