“One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star”
“Our lives can hold just so much. If they're filled with one thing, they can't be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.”
“We'll just have to find more flowers in the spring. That's when they bloom, tra la.”
“All those resolutions she had made on Babcock's bay! How they had been smashed to smithereens! She wondered whether life consisted of making resolutions and breaking them, of climbing up and slipping down.
'I believe that's it', she thought. 'And the bright side of it is that you never slip down to quite the point you started climbing from. You always gain a little....'
She thought about those lists she had made in her programs for self-improvement. She hadn't followed them out by any means, but they had revealed her ideals....
'We're growing up,' Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try to see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be.
'I'd like to be a fine one,' Betsy thought quickly and urgently.”
“We're growing up and I don't like it," said Tacy, as they say at Heinz's later, drinking coffee.”
“Our lives can only hold so much. If they’re filled with one thing, they can’t be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.”
“New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change," Betsy decided profoundly.”
“At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I’d thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she’d shown. Soon, though, I’d figured out the animals’ true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food.”
“That’s what makes life an adventure. Sometimes you just have to jump in and trust in the universe.”
“Janie blinks and leans against the wall, just in case.
But it's no one's dream.
It's just the end of some things.
And the beginning of others.”
“Podkolyosin asked tragically, "Why are you keeping quiet, like the League of Nations?”
“How am I supposed to like myself if all these shitty things keep happening because I do them???”
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