Jeanne Birdsall quotes:

Am I odd?Is there something wrong with me,like Mrs.Tifton Said?" Skye knelt down on the wet grass and looked straight into Batty's eyes. "No you stupid idiot,there's nothing wrong. with you.

...even a tiny bit of deceit is dishonorable when it's used for selfish or cowardly reasons.- Mr. Penderwick

And I don't know if Batty's gotten over it yet,' said Skye. Mr. Penderwick looked out the window to where Batty was playing vampires with Hound. Hound was on his back, trying to wiggle out of the black towel Batty had tied around his neck. Batty was leaping over Hound's water bowl, shrieking, 'Blood, blood!' 'She looks all right,' he said.

The cuter the boy, the mushier your brain.

[The kitchen] was also messy--delightfully so, thought Jane--and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either.

The referee told me this league has never had a brawl of that magnitude," said Mr. Penderwick after a long, painful silence. "Of course, at the time I was pretending to be a casual passerby and not a father at all.

Donit kill her now, just when we've gone to all that trouble to rescue her," said Jeffrey.

People sometimes make unexpected choices when they're lonely