"Penrod"

This old-fashioned romp by Booth Tarkington reminds me strongly of "The Lawrenceville Stories".

• Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in "Toilers of the Sea," encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased in power, he might have been equal to a proper recital of the half hour which followed Penrod's first sight of himself as the Child Sir.
• A human male whose dress has been damaged, or reveals some vital lack, suffers from a hideous and shameful loneliness which makes every second absolutely unbearable until he is again as others of his sex and species;
• Simultaneously, a thick and vasty gasp came from the audience, as from five hundred bathers in a wholly unexpected surf.
• One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations of every natural act.
• Nothing is more pathetically true than that we "never know when we are well off."
• Penrod was doing something very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplished except by coloured people or by a boy in school on a spring day: he was doing really nothing at all. He was merely a state of being.
• ...monotonous stretches of blackboard threateningly defaced by arithmetical formulae and other insignia of torture.
• Nothing is more treacherous than the human mind; nothing else so loves to play the Iscariot. Even when patiently bullied into a semblance of order and training, it may prove but a base and shifty servant.
• It was so still, in fact, that Penrod's newborn notoriety could almost be heard growing.
• The surprising thing about a structure such as Penrod was erecting is that the taller it becomes the more ornamentation it will stand.
• "Let's see you try it, you--you itcher!"