“Ella held herself rigidly against all emotion until she arrived at the dark haven of her room. Then she threw herself across her bed and cried because life was such a tragic thing.”

“Then she laughed, a bubbling, deliciously girlish laugh, and the Thing relaxed its hold on her heart, turned up its toes, and died.”

“...And how that girl did talk against time to make us think she was crazy about her Louie. She called attention to his honesty and his ability and his nose and the shape of his feet and his blue blood and his energy and what-have-you, and all the time, I was dying to quote that smart old Billy Shakespeare who was just as wordy as she was: 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

“Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of [Junior's] speech. Not an insignificant "have went" nor an infinitesimal "I seen" ever escaped the keen ears of his eldest sister, who immediately corrected him. Mother sometimes thought Katherine a little severe when, in the interest of proper speaking, she would stop him in the midst of an exciting account of a home-run. There were times, thought Mother, when the spirit of the thing was so much more important than the flesh in which it was clothed.”

“It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.”

“Seventy-five years ago a young woman kept a diary in which she wrote some of her innermost thoughts, many of the daily happenings, and all of the weather. This story is the fictionalized version of the real diary. The thoughts more or less trite pedantic have been curtailed, the happenings (for obvious reasons) sometimes changed, but the weather remains practically intact. ...So step out of the yellowed diary, Linnie Colsworth,.... Recreate yourself from the fading ink of it's pages and help us understand something of the stanch heart that beat under those hard little stays, bidding you defy convention three-quarters of a century ago.”

“Hair, to Tillie, meant nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory. It was merely, as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes withbulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with countless wire hairpins.”