“He swam against the hard current of the class bores - there were three - who could relate every incident in the book to something in their own lives.”

“With the sound of waves outside, the bed seemed like our own Guld and we were swimmers. Front to front, out bodies slicked with sweat, each swimming and stroking, one against the other. We rode the waves to the crests, then plummeted down, only to ride the wave to the next breaker. We swam against the current that threatened to pull us under.”

“Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.”

“Talk away. If you bore us, we have books."With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.”

“The thing of it was that the girls in my class who date boys do hardly anything else. Girls who I used to think were just boring I now think stupid beyond belief. I call them A-Girls and it is not a compliment.”

“Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.”