“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.”
“The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.”
“People are like that, judging you before they know you.”
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,’ ” he said, quoting Wordsworth. “ ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ little we see in Nature that is ours;/ we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
“Loneliness can drive a person mad. There's a place, in every man's soul, that no friend can reach, only a lover, and he longed for the chance to close that emptiness.”
“...and what is a good weapon but a good idea made murderous flesh?”
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