I'm finished with something, but I'm not beginning anything. That's wrong. When you finish something, you ought always to begin something new.

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.

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?

She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.

Good things come, but they're never perfect; are they? You have to twist them into something perfect.

She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to her round cheeks, almost to the hair ribbons tied in perky bows over her ears.

You have two numbers in your age when you are ten. It's the beginning of growing up.