“Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.”

“My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.”

“I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture of my family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. To explain some of their more curious ways, however, I feel that I should state that at the time we were in Corfu the family were all quite young: Larry, the eldest, was 23; Leslie was 19; Margo was 18; while I was the youngest, being of the tender and impressionble age of 10. We had never been certain of my mother's age for the simple reason she could never remember her date of birth; all I can say is she was old enough to have four children. My mother also insists that I explain that she is a widow for, as she so penetratingly observed, you never know what people might think.”

“They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.”

“Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

“I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting.”

“I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.”