"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."
"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find."
One of the memories he finds is of the Christmas Eve that the Prothero's house caught fire and the firemen had to come... the boys helpfully throw their snowballs at the smoke.
"... and some few small Aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."
The book contains a very fun and realistic description of the relationship between young brothers, which I particularly enjoy:
"It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
"Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloured snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words into the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."