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Quote by Jenny Han

“In the bottom of the desk drawer I found an old composition notebook from my Harriet the Spy days. It was colored in pink and green and yellow highlighter. I'd followed the boys around for days, taking notes in it until I drove Steven crazy and he told Mom on me.”

Quote by Jenny Han

Work

It's Not Summer Without You

This novel explores the depth of friendship and the beauty of life's small pleasures through the eyes of its characters. Set in a picturesque setting, it captures the essence of summer and the memories that come with it. more

Author

Jenny Han
Jenny Han

Jenny Han is a renowned writer known for her young adult literature. Her works are highly appreciated by young readers for their unique perspective and heartfelt emotional descriptions. more

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“Streets were quieter then. Dogs had the run of the town and children played outdoors. The side streets were for Simon Says and Green Light and Giant Step and other games. We set up our own carnivals. We told fortunes and sold coin purses that we made. But the buses on Wisteria Drive meant no one played outside my house. Even the dogs were wary except for one who only had three legs and still chased cars.”

“It is often said that a secure childhood makes the best foundation for a happy life. In marked contrast to her cousin Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart enjoyed an exceptionally cosseted youth. It is left to the judgement of history to decide whether it did, in fact, adequately prepare her for the extreme stresses with which the course of her later life confronted her.”

“To drive the point home, Tocqueville stressed the need for individual initiatives in democracy. Tocqueville had shown in his central theoretical part that democracy had severed the aristocratic chain and, with it, social hierarchies. But in concluding, he saw a multitude of atomized individuals lacking in energy and initiative. He blamed widespread popular indolence on the supervisory grip of the state on citizens' lives that amounted to soft despotism. Democratic men submitted to the authority of 'an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably.”

“So what about you, Fern? Wonder Woman?” Ambrose teased. “Fern decided super heroes weren't for her,” Bailey said from the back. “She decided she would just be a fairy because she liked the option of flying without the responsibility of saving the world. She made a pair of wings from cardboard, covered them in glitter, and rigged up some duct tape straps so she could wear the wings around on her back like a back pack.”

“The amount of time that elapsed between my two-year-old self toddling along the National Mall waving a flag and my eighteen-year-old self moving into a dorm feels vast to me, but I know now how time moves when you're grown-up, and I know those years must have gone much faster for my parents than for me. To my dad, hardly any time at all passed between when the siren called him into the bunker and when he started packing boxes full of shelf-stable food to send to his baby at college.”

“He decided to take the C downtown and fumbled through blizzardy wind to Central Park West. Once there, he stepped inside the park. The wind dropped magically away. In the stillness, Gregory noticed that every twig and branch held a delicate stack of snow. Snow swarmed like honeybees in the golden glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps; it slathered tree trunks and sparkled like crushed diamonds at his feet. He heard a whispering noise and saw two people glide from among the trees on cross-country skis. A lavender lunar radiance filled the park. It was a world from childhood: castles and forests and magic lamps and princes scaling walls of brambles.”

“All this was in contrast to the idea that a newborn, on the basis of cortical immaturity, is a being who remembers and understands nothing: a person only within the context of the mother’s acknowledgment, blank, a species of human cabbage.”