Цитаты из книги Fifteen

Experience! How was a girl going to get any experience when her mother was so old-fashioned she didn't even want her daughter to go to the movies with a boy unless she personally knew his whole family tree for a couple of generations?

Jane stared out the window at the lights on the bridges, strung like two gold necklaces across the bay.

Besides, if she couldn't go to the dance with Stan, she didn't want to go with anyone.

When a boy sees a girl every day and takes her to dinner in the city and buys her a back scratcher and notices the fog on her hair, naturally he asks her to go to the first school dance.

It seemed like an imaginary city, a magic city, a city which appeared from the mists and might disappear if she closed her eyes for a moment.

For the first time since she entered Woodmont High she would feel that she really belonged.

"You and Julie are only going about eight miles to eat some food you probably won't like, with a couple of high school kids who are, I would like to remind you, mere mortals".

Only fifteen! That old argument. Well, she wasn't going to be fifteen all her life.

Now she was really grown-up, mature, sophisticated, a young woman with a dinner date.

A girl shouldn't hold a baked stuffed onion against a boy forever.

A boy did not ask a girl to go to dinner in the city unless she was somebody extra special.

Soon. Jane did not like the word. It could mean anything - an hour or a week or a month. Men were so exasperating.

She's not like some mothers who can't make their children mind but expect a sitter to be able to.

Good for Mom, thought Jane;  she isn't behaving badly at all, even though she isn't wearing stockings.

"I've read about what noble animals dogs are. Man's best friend and all that. They rouse sleeping people in burning buildings. They drag little children out of fishponds. They also dig up gardens. I have enough trouble with the neighbor's dogs running through the begonias and burying bones in the chrysanthemum bed without spending perfectly good money on a four-legged force of destruction of our own"

Poor thing, thought Jane; I believe he's relieved to be caught. He wouldn't know what to do with his freedom if he had it.

That was the trouble with her. She always thought of the right answer too late, of if she did think of it at the right time she was too shy to say it.

Jane flashed her best friend a Julie-how-could-you-look, which Julie returned with an I-know-but-what-could-I-do expression.

"At our house we always call a clear windy day a good drying day. When we lived in the city there was so much fog Mom always had a hard time getting the washing dry, and almost every morning she would look out the window and say hopefully, "Maybe today will be a good drying day".

"You know," said Jane thoughtfully, when they had finished laughing. "It's funny about bicycles. I never ride mine anymore. For some reason, when you're in high school it won't do to be seen riding a bicycle because you need it to get someplace, but it's all right to ride one for fun if you don't really need to. Like going on a picnic or something".