“One summer morning at sunrise a long time agoI met a little girl with a book under her arm.I asked her why she was out so early andshe answered that there were too many books andfar too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”

“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.”

“Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”

“Because of something she heard in school, Corrie asked her father what "sex sin" was while the two of them were riding on a train together. The father asked the little girl to carry his bag off the train. When she admitted that she could not do so, he said he would not be much of a father to expect this of her. The load was too heavy. This was the case, he said, with some knowledge. She needed to trust her father to give her knowledge at the right time.”

“Chase asks her what time the appointment is booked for. Rachel says, "It's at 11:30 or midnight. He's supposed to call to confirm." She checks her cell. "But I want to be there early." she says."Why?""Just to be on the safe side.""There isn't one, Rachel.”

“Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.”