“It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.”

“It's way too long and I gave up on it. Abandoning forever an innocent child to a hostile and unforgiving land. Sometimes I still hear him crying late at night. He sounds exactly like a malfunctioning air conditioner.”

“Try now, try now, it isn't too late'...Excitement, like hysteria, bubbled up in me from a hundred unsealed springs. If it isn't too late, I thought confusedly, neither it is too early: I haven't much time left to spoil. It was the last flicker of instinct of self-preservation which had failed me so signally at Brandham Hall.”

“It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now”

“I'm starting to realize that I can't be a child forever, that I don't want to be a child forever. I've had my turn, and now it's time to grow up.”

“Maybe I just left it too late, and things changed too much for us to go back to where we were.”