Entraînement à la Grammaire Anglaise à Distance

1. ‘I think we ought to bomb the daylights out of them, as long as we don't hit any women or children or old people, don't you?' he was saying to Mrs. Patch-Withers, perched nervously behind her urn. ‘Or hospitals,' he went on. ‘And naturally no schools. Or churches.'

2. He looked at me with an interested, surprised expression. ‘You want to study? [...] I didn't know you needed to study,' he said simply, 'I didn't think you ever did. I thought it just came to you.'

3. Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

4. ‘I think we ought to bomb the daylights out of them, as long as we don't hit any women or children or old people, don't you? [...] Or hospitals,' he went on. ‘And naturally no schools. Or churches.' ‘We must also be careful about works of art,' she put in, ‘if they are of permanent value.'

5. ‘There's a long-distance call for you,' he continued in the tone of the judge performing the disagreeable duty of telling the defendant his right. ‘I've written the operator's number on the pad beside the telephone in my study. You may go in and call.'

6. ‘You? Talk too much? How can you accuse me of accusing you of that!' As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

7. Blitzball was the surprise of the summer. Everybody played it; I believe a form of it is still popular at Devon. But nobody can be playing it as it was played by Phineas. He had unconsciously invented a game which brought his own athletic gifts to their highest pitch.

8. It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back.