“Well, it is. One of her 'pretends' is that she is a princess. She plays it all the time—even in school. She says it makes her learn her lessons better. She wants Ermengarde to be one, too, but Ermengarde says she is too fat.”

“She wanted to have him hold her and tell her all the demons were pretend, that there was no monster in her closet, that everything would be okay. But that was a lie. The demon was in her head, telling her she was too fat. She had to get the demon out. But she couldn't do it by herself.”

“She has regular features but yet one could not say that she was pretty. She is too big and too stout. Her features are not regular and yet one could say that she is very pretty. She is too small and too thin. She's a voice teacher”

“The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.”

“Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.”

“But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too. C'mon, Lennie, she used to say to me at least ten times a day. C'mon Len. And that makes me feel better, like it's her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.”