Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

. . . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.