From the reading pile:

"Each one looked very much like the other (except for
the color, of course) and some looked even more like
each other than they did like themselves."
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
(I am reading this to Hattie)

"'Miss,' said Jimmy Waites breathlessly, 'Eileen Burton's
knicker elastic's busted, and she won't come out of the
lavatory she says, until you brings a pin!' Miss Gray
put the ring in her bag and hastened away, while I returned
to my room to choose the morning hymn, observing, as I went,
how seldom one can indulge in the inflation of any sort of
emotion without life's little pin-pricks bursting the
balloon.

'And a very good thing too,' I was moralizing to myself,
'emotions cannot be enjoyed without them becoming dangerous
to one's sense of proportion,' and I was about to develop
this lofty theme, when I caught sight of Ernest, and was
obliged to break off to direct him to wipe his nose."
Village School by Miss Read

"I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great
deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic
things, in fairies and all their kin. It is not surprising
that when children are grown, they have so little idealism or
imagination nor that so many of them are like the infidel who
asserted that he would not believe anything that he could not
see. It was a good retort the Quaker made, "Friend! Does thee
believe thee has any brains?"
Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings by
Laura Ingalls Wilder

"The most salutary social institution to emerge in the
West during this period between the fall of Rome and the
pontificate of Gregory the Great was Benedictine
monasticism. This institution became the primary, if not
the sole, preserver among the barbarians of the classical
writings of antiquity. Rome employed it as its chief
agency of evangelism and instruction in the Christian faith."
History of Christianity in the Middle Ages
by William Ragsdale Cannon