“Now isn't that nice!' said the old lady. 'If cousins are the right kind, they're best of all: kinder than sisters and brothers, and closer than friends.”

“Maybe we benefit from the providence of others more often than we know.”

“Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always.”

“Mr. Payton was at work on his pipe again, lighting and coaxing it. "They need constant attention, pipes, like babies and guinea hens," he said, and sucked in the smoke.”

“Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. "Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom.”

“There are long stretches of time when I don't know what I am doing,or what I have done - nothing mostly, but sometimesit would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was...”

“They are surprisingly tall--eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers' children look like proper people by the aged of eight...”