“It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her...Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.”

“Sorry, old girl," I said to [my bicycle] Gladys in the gray dishwater light of early morning, "but I have to leave you at home."I could see that she was disappointed, even though she managed to put on a brave face."I need you to stay here as a decoy," I whispered. "When they see you leaning against the greenhouse, they'll think I'm still in bed." Gladys brightened considerably at the thought of a conspiracy. [...]At the corner of the garden, I turned, and mouthed the words, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," and Gladys signaled that she wouldn't.I was off like a shot.”

“I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut. "A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?”

“Do What?' 'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?''Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.'I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.”

“You must have loved her awfully," I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead. "Yes, sometimes very much," Porcelain said reflectively, "-and sometimes not at all." She must have seen my startled reaction. "Love's not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you're a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing's left but a trickle..." "Or stopped completely, I added.”

“Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.”

“Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.”