Edward Eager Quotes

“There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.”

“Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it.”

“Because of course the only way pretending is any good is if you never say right out that that’s what you’re doing.”

“The children never went to the country or lake in the summer, the way their friends did, because their father was dead and their mother worked very hard on the newspaper, the one almost nobody on the block took.”

“If you’re going to argue, and Jane usually was, you want people to line up all their objections at a time; then you can knock them all down at once.”

“She knew she was a comfort, and docile, because she’d heard her mother say so. And the others knew she was, too, by now, because ever since that day Katharine would keep boasting about what a comfort she was, and how docile, until Jane declared she would utter a piercing shriek and fall over dead if she heard another word about it.”

“When you have magic powers and know it, it can be a fine feeling, like a pleasant tingling inside. But in order to enjoy that tingling, you have to know just how much magic you have and what the rules are for using it.”

″‘The thing is,’ Mark went on, ‘was it just an accident, or did we want so much to be magic we got that way, somehow? The thing is, each of us ought to make a wish. That’ll prove it one way or the other.‘”

″...nothing happened except Mrs. Hudson’s coming out and chasing them with a broom the way she always did, and saying she’d tell their mother. This didn’t worry them much, because their mother always said it was Mrs. Hudson’s own fault, that people who had trouble with children brought it on themselves...”

“The nonfiction books he tried were mostly called things like “When I Was a Boy in Greece,” or “Happy Days on the Prairie”—things that made them sound like stories, only they weren’t. They made Mark furious. ‘It’s being made to learn things not on purpose. It’s unfair,’ he said. ‘It’s sly’”