Quotes from Barbara Cohen

I cried for a little while, taking a kind of melancholy delight in my own tears, and then I fell asleep.

We had all commenced that thrusting and parrying that always goes on when you meet new people. How I hated those games. I wondered if they went on forever. Did you ever grow up enough not to have to jockey for position? Could you ever just say, 'Hi, I'm Rachel Gold. I like to read and eat. Who are you?

Just then Rosie skipped down the stairs and across the lobby. Rosie never walked - she tripped or skipped or danced.

I want my new friends and my old friends to get together,' she said, 'so we're going to have a shoe dance. All the guys take off one shoe and put it in the middle of the floor. All the girls pick a shoe, find its mate, and dance with the fellow who's wearing it.' Without a second's hesitation, I glanced over at Billy. He was standing next to Sally at the victrola. His saddle shoes were black and white, not brown and white, and very dirty. I memorized the dirt.

She chattered on about the Inn. 'I'm a genius,' she said. 'I got three hundred people into two rooms that were meant to hold two hundred and fifty. And they're happy. Deep down, people are really sardines. They love being squeezed together.

Mrs. Littnauer must have brought thirty dresses back to the fitting room for me to try on. But most of them weren't right on me. I was sixteen years old and a size sixteen, not, after all, a very promising combination. There was one rose velvet thing with a white lace collar and cuffs, cut in a princess line, which didn't look bad, but there was nothing at all sophisticated about it ... 'Put me in a pair of Mary Janes and I'll look like a five-year-old from Brobdingnag,' I said.

The nice thing about a round table is that it can seat an almost infinite number of people, as King Arthur found out long ago.

Most of the time when you talk to people, nothing happens. It's all just, 'Pass me the salt,' and 'Remember to pick up some shampoo for me when you go to the drugstore.' But, when I talked to Jeff, I felt that he was touching my mind and I was touching his.

It's amazing what you have to buy after a fire has completely wiped you out - things you never think about, like toothbrushes and boots and a dictionary. Of course, people gave us things, but mostly they didn't fit, and Mother said this was no time for us to go around looking like orphans of the storm.

We didn't sit down after the waltz because the next set was fox trots. Someone had turned out the overhead lights and only the candles on the tables glimmered in the darkened room. Jeff held me very close to him and we moved silently through the dimness.