“Spare us the pout, there’s enough lip in the world without you adding to it.”

“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.”

“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?”

“It’s not polite to ask ” he said with a slight smile. “One must never ask a policeman his secrets.” “Why not ” “For the same reason I don’t ask you yours.” How I adored this man! Here we were the two of us engaged in a mental game of chess in which both of us knew that one of us was cheating. At the risk of repetition, how I adored this man!”

“While you've been gadding about the countryside, we've held a meeting, and we've all of us decided that you must go.'In short, we've voted you out of the family,' Daffy said. 'It was unanimous.”

“Now, glancing over...as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil's Hairball.”

“When you're that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me-- that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.”