“I guess I had never bothered to consider that there might such a thing as a boy, but now that I had found one, I thought it was just about the most wonderful concept in the world. He smelled of mud and sugar and an animal I’d never scented before, and a faint meaty odor clung to his fingers, so I licked them.”
“The recipe for fun is pretty simple raising boys: add to any activity an element of danger, stir in a little exploration, add a dash of destruction, and you’ve got yourself a winner.”
“Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed and even more rarely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is nearly always given by his father.”
“It wouldn’t do any good to tell him that she hadn’t been that girl at her old school. Yeah, she’d been made fun of before. There were always mean boys—and there were always, always mean girls—but she’d had friends at her old school.”
“I was just getting ready to stick my tongue out at them; but then I thought about what Miss Franny said, about war being hell, and I thought about what Gloria Dump said, about not judging them too hard. And so I just waved instead.”
“When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym, staring at basketball practice, he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.”
“But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster.”
“He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek Country, while he had come the round-about way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. ”
“Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his arms. His hand fell on the boy’s head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to his lips, and began to cry.”
“I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river.”
“He sketches you as the antagonist and suddenly his transgressions become deleted scenes. He blames you for his sadness. And this is how the wolf cries boy.”
“Brody is the toy that all the other kids want to own, so obviously Selah wants to be the one to lock him down. He’s a fill-in-the-blank... it could be a purse, a car, a trip, a new pair of shoes. She’s constantly in pursuit of shiny things, and well, he is very shiny.”
Essentially the story of a boy abandoned by his people, Toby Alone touches on several universal themes including social class, capitalism and big business, the need to protect our environment, and appreciating the value of each and every human being.
But that was before she fell in love with a boy who barely knows she exists, before she auditioned for the school play, before she met the family of freaks her sister Debbie is marrying into, before the unpredictable Raven De Head took an interest in her, and before she realized that at the right time and for the right reason, a birkett could be a beautiful thing.
“At playtime she twirled and spun across the playground so fast that none of the little boys in her class could catch her, and they were all very annoyed.”
“Nguyen was by now thoroughly spooked. Artemis generally had that effect on people. A pale adolescent speaking with the authority and vocabulary of a powerful adult. Nguyen had heard the name Fowl before—who hadn’t in the international underworld?—but he’d assumed he’d be dealing with Artemis senior, not this boy. Though the word “boy” hardly seemed to do this gaunt individual justice.”
“Corrie and I were probably the most energetic. We took a few walks, back to the bridge, or to different cliffs, so we could have long private conversations. We talked about boys and friends and school and parents, all the usual stuff.”
“By the time he went to school, Max was not a flying superhero, but just an ordinary boy with a cape and a mask...which were no help to him at all in the school yard.”
“I said that I had never experienced a love-pinch and on a wave of amusement Kiser said, ‘Then you got that to look forward to. I don’t know, though. That Yancey fella don’t look very playful to me and Gaither’s not a very forward boy so maybe you’ll just have to skip that part of your life.’ ”
“One day Grace’s teacher said they would do the play Peter Pan. Grace knew who she wanted to be. When she raised her hand, Raj said, ‘You can’t be Peter- that’s a boy’s name.‘”
“ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Treehorn,’ said Treehorn. ‘First time I ever heard of a family naming two boys the same name,’ said the bus driver. ‘Guess they couldn’t think of any other name, once they thought of Treehorn.’ Treenhorn said nothing.”
“Fifteen-year-old Jess’s grandfather has just had a major heart attack, but he insists he finish his painting, River Boy. At first, Jess cannot understand why this painting is so important to her grandfather, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any boy in it at all. But while swimming in the river herself, Jess begins to feel the presence of a strange boy. Could this be the same one her ailing grandfather struggles to paint? And if so, why has he returned?”
“Harry Potter is just a boy, who is orphaned and is living with his unbearable Uncle, Aunt and their son, Dudley. He lives a miserable existence, where he is forced to live in a tiny cupboard under the stairs. However, his life is about to change.”
“Woe to those boys who rebel against their parents and run away from home. They will never come to any good in the world, and sooner or later they will repent bitterly.”
“I even presume to sit at his desk while I write this book, hoping some magical transference will take place and I’ll be gifted, if only for this moment, with his way with words. I feel like a boy trying to fit into his dad’s running shoes.”
“There is a girl with no front teeth. And a boy with hardly any hair Having had it cut.
There are sums without answers, painting unfinished, And projects with no hope of ever coming to an end.”
A boy gets two gerbils from a friend and so starts the battle between him and his sisters (with the silent support of his step-father) on one side and his mother on the other.
“It was going to be different, having another boy about. There was a spare room for him to sleep in, but Keith would still have a lot of sharing to do.”
“Ramona considered. Kindergarten had not turned out as she had expected. Still, even though she had not been given a present and Miss Binney did not love her, she had liked being with other boys and girls her own age. She liked singing the song about the dawnzer and having her own little cupboard. ”
“My dears, you will have thirty-five children, and they will all be good and beautiful. Seventeen of your children will be boys and eighteen will be girls. The hair of the whole of your children will curl naturally. They will never have the measles, and they will have recovered from the whooping-cough before being born.”
“Girls and boys come out to play,
The moon it shines as bright as day;
Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And come to your playmates in the street;
Come with a whoop, come with a call,
Come with a good will, or come not at all;
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A halfpenny loaf will serve us all.”
It starts as a realistic novel, describing the desolate situation of a boy trying to cope with severe dyslexia. But the author adds too many problems. His mom has left, his dad is an unreliable alcoholic, his teacher an unbelievably one-dimensional bully.
“A boy was the accident of a moment, something as light and brief as a sun-glint on water- but a good trick was something to chuckle over for a hundred years.”
″ ‘I don’t think I like boys,’ answered the Swallow. ‘Last summer, when I was staying on the river, there were two rude boys, the miller’s sons, who were always throwing stones at me.’ ”
“Australian girls nearly always begin to think of ‘lovers and nonsense’, as middlefolks call it, long before their English aged sisters do. While still in the short-frocked period of existence, and while their hair is still free-flowing, they take the keenest interest in boys- boy of neighboring schools, other girls’ brothers, young bank clerks and the like.”
“For she was seeing the peacocks through a great, barred gate, with a funny little boy in a sailor suit and a wide-brimmed hat, whose wistful eyes looked sadly out between his odd tufts of red hair.”
“Neither of the girls had ever heard of a poor working boy with three names. ‘You’re not making it up?’ Cilla asked, almost respectfully. ‘I’ve heard tell of folk with three names, but I never saw one before.’ ”
“I want you to let Caddie run wild with the boys. Don’t keep her in the house learning to be a lady. I would rather see her learn to plow than make samplers, if she can get her health by doing so. I believe it is worth trying. Bring the other girls up as you like, but let me have Caddie.”
John and Pat, two boys from completely different worlds, meet and become friends in England. Both boys are disappointed to be just a little too young to enlist in the war that has taken both of their fathers off to fight.
“I shall only answer if you call me George. I hate being a girl. I won’t be. I don’t like doing the things that girls do. I like doing the things that boys do.”
″ ‘Meat and drink on the same tree!’ cried Peterkin; ‘washing in the sea, lodging on the ground, -and all for nothing! My dear boys, we’re set up for life; it must be the ancient Paradise, -hurrah!’ ”
“It was a boyish thing to do and it caught the hesitating girl in the depths of her heart, as the boy element in a man ever appeals to a motherly woman.”
“Street Show
Puff, puff, puff. How the trumpets blow
All you little boys and girls come and see the show.
One-two-three, the Cat runs up the tree;
But the little Bird he flies away-
‘She hasn’t got me!’ ”
″ ‘Oh, Murder! What was that, Papa!’
‘My child, it was a Motor-Car, A Most Ingenious Toy!
Designed to Captivate and Charm
Much rather than to rouse Alarm
In any English Boy.’ ”
“The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Were I a private school-master, I should say, Let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest.”