Beck, Martha. Expecting Adam 1999

A pregnant woman discovers her baby (Adam) has Down's syndrome

6: You'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been by being closed

10: I don't know if I ever met anyone at Harvard who found it pleasant

13: [the pressure at Harvard to abort; John being humiliated by a "world renowned economic theorist" because he took his pregnant wife to the hospital

42: John was one of about 50 students to achieve the coveted status of summa cum laude. I managed to love & accept him despite this ... His mother leaned over to me & explained: "John is not really intelligent. He's just a hard worker"

44: With that enormous smile that means that he's really, really worried

73: The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life but in it.

77: Harvard's Dr. Smurf

83: like the military's attack on Grenada: "a pre‑dawn vertical insertion"

98: Whatever supernatural beings are operating around us, they are working from a priority list that is very different from mine. Strangely enough, I have learned to trust them anyway.

101: Adam has angels like a dog has fleas

110: We took to our new environment like a hog to slops

116: Those of us who are trained in the social sciences know how to find data to support whatever we want to be true

123: The IQ test: "do dogs manufacture"? Yes, if it means the same as make.

134: You guys think just because a baby isn't born yet, it doesn't exist. Get rid of it before a man ever sees it, and it never happened. Ask any woman who's five months pregnant whether her baby exists or not.

170: I had followed the good old Baconian logic of refusing to believe anything until it was proven to be true. Now I decided that I was willing to believe anything until it was proven false.

222: The lifetime of fear in Dr. Grendel, desperately avoiding the stigma of stupidity

240: pro‑lifers overdoing it

246: I did not see the imposing powerful father of my childhood. I saw an old man who had never, not for one moment of his life, believed that it was possible to be loved for himself.

262: My karma ran over my dogma

271: The Down's teenager who could not speak but could use a computer

275: The Texan Carver insisting that ambition is what separates the boys from the men [It's not; it's responsibility]

285: I prayed without trying to control the answer

Adam smelling the bushes: the spirit rejoices in the sensual.