Anastasia Krupnik Quotes

Anastasia deals with everyday problems such as popularity, the wart on her thumb or the new arrival of her little brother, Sam. The book is written in episodic fashion, each chapter self-contained with minimal narrative link to the others. At the end of each chapter is a list written by Anastasia, listing her likes and dislikes, showing the character’s growth and development through the story.

“There were so many poems being born in Anastasia’s head that she ran all the way home from school to find a private place to write them down, the way her cat had once found a very private place -the pile of ironing in the pantry - in which to create kittens. But she discovered that it wasn’t easy. She hung the Do No Disturb sign from the Parker House Hotel on the doorknob of her bedroom door.”

“Anastasia Krupnik was ten. She had hair the color of Hubbard squash, fourteen freckles across her nose (and seven others in places that she preferred people not to know about), and glasses with large owl-eyed rims, which se had chosen herself at the optician’s.”

“Anastasia’s father, Dr. Myron Krupnik, was a professor de literature and had read just about every book in the world, which may have been why he knew so much about warts. He had a bear the color of Hubbard squash, though not much hair in his head, and he wore glasses for astigmatism, as Anastasia did, although his were not quite as owly.”

“In the bookcases of their apartment were four volumes of poetry which had written by Myron Krupnik. But the fourth book was her favorite. Her father’s photograph showed him bald and bearded, the way she had always know him. The poems were soft sounding and quiet, when he read them to her. The book was called Bittersweet; and it said, inside, ‘To someone special: Anastasia’.”

“Awed, unique, and proud were three words that she had written on page seven of her green notebook. She kept lists of her favorite words, she kept important private information; and she kept things that she though might be the beginnings of poems, in her green notebook. No one had ever looked inside the green notebook except Anastasia.”

‘I have fallen in love,’ Anastasia told her parents one morning at breakfast. It made her feel a little shy to talk about it. But she felt that her parents ought to know. Her father blew a ripple into his coffee thoughtfully. ‘You seem a little young for that,’ he said.”

“So she wrote on her green notebook, ‘Why don’t I like Mrs Westvessel?’ and began to make a list of reasons. Making lists of reasons was sometimes a good way to figure things out. ‘Reason one’ wrote Anastasia, ‘Because she isn’t a good teacher.’

“She stomped down the hall to her bedroom. In the darkest corner of her closet she found the heavy canvas bag that left over from her father’s days in the Navy, it had Krupnik M A stenciled on the side. Once, when she was smaller, her father had put her into it, pulled the drawstring closed, and carried her around the apartment while she giggled.”

“She had been angry the day she came down with the flu and had a temperature of 103° and had to miss the special Children’s Concert that the Boston Symphony was doing, and her parents gave the tickets to the terrible Truesdales who lived in the upstairs apartment.”

“Anastasia went home. She wanted to tell her parents about her decision to become a Catholic, but she knew that she had to tell them at the right moment, in the right way, because if would be something of a surprise. They might even be a little upset, she suspected, that she was changing her name.”

“Jennifer groaned. ‘How do you know? How can you tell when you’re in love?’ That was something that Anastasia had thought about a great deal. She had stood in the corner drugstore, reading a questionnaire called “is it really love?′ in Cosmopolitan until the pharmacist, Mr. Belden had said, ‘Pay for ir or close it up, girlie.”

“But when Mrs. Westvessel announced one day in the fall that the class would begin writing poetry, Anastasia was the happiest she had ever been in school. Somewhere, off in a place beyond her own thoughts, Anastasia could hear Mrs. Westvessel’s voice. She was reading some poems to the class; she was talking about poetry and how it was made.”