youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.