“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.”
“You know that expression, ‘It hit me like a ton of bricks’? It’s true. The minute she turned the car around and ended up on my doorstep in her purple pajamas, that’s how I felt about Lena.”
“It later struck him that the picture he had drawn of Memo sitting domestically home wasn’t exactly the girl she was. The kind he had in mind, though it bothered him to admit it, was more like Iris seemed to be, only she didn’t suit him.”
“When I was a little girl fairy tales were my favorite books because even before you opened them you knew how they are going to end. Happily ever after.”
“In life, there are only four kinds of girls:
The girl who played with fire.
The girl who opened Pandora’s Box.
The girl who gave Adam the apple.
And the girl whose best friend stole her boyfriend.”
“So this is a pageant.
A violent one, meant to showcase a girl’s beauty, splendor—and strength. The most talented daughter. This is a display of power, to pair the prince with the most powerful girl, so that their children might be the strongest of all. And this has been going on for hundreds of years.
I shudder to think of the strength in Cal’s pinkie finger.”
“Of course, some of the girls are no longer children. Yet they are not allowed to be women. They are not married. There is no place for them in this way of life here. Except to do hard work or study scriptures. Their hopes and desires die on the vine. This turns them inward. They are seeking ways out of themselves. So they come to Tituba.”
“The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.”
“He could still taste her lips from when he’d kissed her in the restroom. He’d never forget it. The sweet sourness of Red Bull, coffee, and the bacteria on her teeth. The humility of it, the realness of a pretty girl with bad breath.”
“So what do people see when they read that well-behaved women rarely make history? Do they imagine good-time girls in stiletto heels or do-good girls carrying clipboards and passing petitions? Do they envision an out-of-control hobbyist or a single mother taking down a drunk in a bar? I suspect that it depends on where they stand themselves.”
The girls, who often experience related feelings of isolation and misunderstanding, live in a rundown home on the far-rural edges of Sydney, Australia with their uncle, a piano player at a dilapidated hotel in the city, and mother who may be carrying on a secret affair.
Duborsarsky’s descriptions of the girls’ surroundings, as well as her subtle details about each one of their personalities, creates very vivid images of each character. However, the characters as a whole seem to fall a bit short, never being fully realized, as only Matilda seems to go through the greatest changes from beginning to end.
A girl walks to school each day and sees a cat. The cat talks to her. The cat is quite the philosopher. She tells the girl what she knows about the world. The cat makes the girl late for school and that causes the girl problems.
This is a touching narrative about a family whose surname is “Silk”. In that family, the little boy in the family, Griffin Silk, has troubles at school with bullies until a girl named Layla comes along. Then, he finds out his baby sister being born, and he is named “Tishkin Silk”, hence the name of this story.
“And the whale herd sang their gladness that the tribe would also live, because they knew that the girl would need to be carefully taught before she could claim the place for her people in the world”
“Gracey’s my sister. I like her. She’s not like the rest of the girls in town. She don’t chase after all the boys and play that game like. She could catch them all right, don’t you worry. Gracey’s the fastest girl across the ground you’ve ever seen.”
″ ‘You are a stupid little girl!’ Mrs. Winter said.
‘I am not a stupid little girl!’ I cried. ‘I am a very nice little girl!’
‘Go and stand in the corner,; Mrs. Winter said.
Then I got cross, and I saw red, and I put the Magic Finger on Mrs. Winter good and strong, and almost at once …”
“Becky was pushing the wheelchair and Nelita and Lana were holding his hands- lucky guy! They were whirling him in big circles across the floor, swooping him in and out among the other kids...”
“She was determined that her efforts to help him would be successful. Then Mistress Elke and all the others like her would see. They’d see that girl or not- young or not- she was a healer.”
“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 family secret, a miraculous transformation, an Internet stranger, a friendly American scientist, and a girl with the strength to make it all come out right.
“Miss Bank and her sister Emily believed that girls should be taught as thoroughly and as carefully as boys. They had bought three houses in a quiet square, a pleasant place with plane trees and well-behaved pigeons, and put up a brass plate saying: The Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies - they had prospered.”
“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. ”
″ ‘You know, Cassie,’ I say one day. ‘You are not just some girl who does unusual stuff. You are Cassie! You make up fantabulous games! You’re nice!’ ”
“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.”
“When a golden girl can win
Prayer from out the lips of sin,
When the barren almond bears,
And a little child gives away its tears,
Then shall all the house be still
And peace comes to Canterville.”
“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.”
The girls (in Halinka’s room) are 12 (well they’re in two grades so I’d guess different ages by at least a year) but they did seem a bit younger to me. Maybe 10? Maybe 11? Given their backgrounds and circumstances and given that this is historical fiction and not contemporary, I guess they could seem a bit younger to me than they are.
“She is like a peach, a beautiful, smooth, rich peach, that has come to ripeness almost in a day, and that hastens to rub off the soft delicate bloom that is its chief charm, just to show its bright, warm colouring more clearly.”
“Girls will be girls, Miss Slighcarp, and you must allow something for the natural high spirits and excitement attendant on your own arrival and the expected one of her cousin.”
“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.’ ”
“That means that today you’ve become a big girl. Everybody’s baby teeth get loose and come out when they grow up. A nice new bigger and better tooth will grow in when this one comes out.”
“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.”
“Jancsi began to realize that this dirty, skinny little girl in the plain blue dress was his cousin. He felt cheated- that was bad enough- but she called Father ‘funny’ and said he was a girl- that was really too much!”
“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!’ ”
“And they do! The girls fall in love with the King of Spain, perform in the School Entertainment, and for the first time, go all the way over the Big Hill to Little Syria by themselves.
“When the girls stand up against the bullies who are bothering their new friend Naifi, Tib’s dress gets torn. But Tib’s mother assures them she is glad that Tib defended her new friend, even at the expense of her best dress.”
Women were bad enough in all conscience, but little girls were worse. He detested the way they had of sidling past him timidly, with sidewise glances, as if they expected him to gobble them up at a mouthful if they ventured to say a word. That was the Avonlea type of well-bred little girl. But this freckled witch was very different, and although he found it rather difficult for his slower intelligence to keep up with her brisk mental processes he thought that he “kind of liked her chatter.”
Boys are trying enough to human patience, goodness knows, but girls are infinitely more so, especially to nervous gentlemen with tyrannical tempers and no more talent for teaching than Dr. Blimber.
“Oh no, that wouldn’t do for this. That’s good enough for little rubbishy common things—specially with gals, cuz _they_ go back on you anyway, and blab if they get in a huff—but there orter be writing ‘bout a big thing like this. And blood.”
“What a curious kind of a fool a girl is! Never been licked in school! Shucks! What’s a licking! That’s just like a girl—they’re so thin-skinned and chicken-hearted.”