“Try not to be in a hurry to get older because youth happens once in your life. Thereafter, old age stays with you forever.”

“For he or she that harbours no fear has never truly loved anything. You can only measure true love by the thought and fear of its loss.”

“Don’t listen to what people tell you because they’ll try to bring you down. And don’t listen to yourself, either, because yourself will try to bring you down even more so than anyone else. As long as you just put all your energy into one thing, it can happen.”

“You are all perfectly correct in your implications that we would be safer if we stayed home in our rooms...But we would also be duller, stupider, and, finally, sadder. If you want to avoid danger, don't get born. Once you are born, make something of it!”

“Because she'd once made a horrible decision that would haunt her forever, and because the one person in the world she'd trusted without reservation was lying to her.”

“Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."I sighed and looked out at Little Bee Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world.”

“It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long; it would last forever. But it's just a blink.”