73 Quotes by Jeanne Birdsall

Ready, Lydia?" Jack asked, "Can you run?"Could she? A bobolink warbled the answer."Yes," said Lydia, all hope and exhilaration. "Yes, I can." And away they went. the three together, prancing, leaping, gamboling into the future.

Don't kill her now, just when we've gone to all that trouble to rescue her," said Jeffrey.

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

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.

It wasn't a rock. It was a dog's rubber bone, left behind months ago to be buried first under autumn leaves, then winter snow. Just an old rubber bone, but Batty was already braced for what she knew would come—the rushing in her ears, the stab in her stomach, and the seeping away of the colors from her world. The soft blue spring sky, the yellow forsythia hedge, even Ben's bright red hair—all dulled, all gray and wretched.

Then that night there was an early frost, and by Sunday morning, autumn had truly arrived. The sky was a rich cloudless blue, the air still and dry, the maple trees glowing with glorious reds and oranges and yellows, and everywhere on Gardam Street squirrels bustled about with self-importance, burying their nuts in the most unlikely places.

I do, too, understand. Rosalind wants to find creepy ladies for Daddy so we don't have to worry about stepmothers.

He'll come," said Rosalind. "He's got to.

[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.