Allende's The House of Spirits

How to react to an angry, explosive man:

He shouted like a madman, pacing up and down the living room and slamming his fist against the furniture, arguing that if Clara intended to follow in her mother’s footsteps she was going to come face to face with a real man, who would pull her pants down and giver her a good spanking so she’d get it out of her damned head to go around haranguing people, and that he categorically forbade her to go to prayer meetings or any other kind and that he wasn’t some ninny whose wife could go around making a fool of him. Clara let him scream his head off and bang on the furniture until he was exhausted. Then, inattentive as ever, she asked him if he knew how to wiggle his ears (106).

Ferula, the spinster sister of Esteban Trueba:

She was a regal matron, but with a bitter smile on her face that revealed her inner tragedy (109).

Nana, the Trueba’s live in nanny:

She had been born to cradle other people’s children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people’s roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery (124).

On charity and giving to the poor:

“This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity; they need justice” (136).