“One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star”

“When there are boys you have to worry about how you look, and whether they like you, and why they like another girl better, and whether they're going to ask you to something or other. It's a strain.”

“The wastes of snow on the hill were ghostly in the moonlight. The stars were piercingly bright.”

“Then he kissed her. Betsy didn't believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn't mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.”

“Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?”

“Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels.”

“It looks like something out of Whittier's "Snowbound,"' Julia said. Julia could always think of things like that to say.”