“Childhood is the purest state. The pure of heart never leave it behind. Their life merely takes them on a cirtuitous route away from, and then back to it.”

“Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? Agatha would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.”

“You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?”

“It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.”

“The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.”

“The mere fact that Lottie had come and gone away again made things seem a little worse-just as perhaps prisoners feel a little more desolate after visitors come and go, leaving them behind.”