“They did look tough - and tall. One girl in particular had legs like stilts. She was bent down, touching her toes with her ankles crossed. She looked like a grazing giraffe.”

“The Ethan of her dreams had disappeared. He was just another person who was sad. She was kind of glad, actually. Dreams disappeared when you woke up. The real thing was better anyway.”

“He looked at her, smiling. Her heart—which had been beating pretty rapidly all evening, increased in pace. His hair was ruffled and he had a scattering of sand on his arms. He was gorgeous. And he was looking at her as if she were covered in maple syrup and he wanted to lick it off. She couldn’t believe her luck.”

“Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues.”

“She looked as though everything that she didn't like had happened to her.”

“At once, she dropped her gaze 2 the floor so she wouldn’t have 2 meet the stares because she knew exactly how she looked, which was bad, very bad, extra bad from the top of her dyed head to the tip of her tennis-shoed toes. She had an enormous urge to look up and say to the class, “I’m prettier than this. Really.”

“Because of course she had known she must go. She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.”