The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

...and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay parties.

Soldiers don't complain...I am not going to do it; I will pretend this is part of a war.

And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.

Perhaps to be able to learn things quickly isn't everything. To be kind is worth a great deal to other people...Lots of clever people have done harm and have been wicked.

If I go on talking and talking...and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don't forget, but you bear it better.

If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought, there will be no room in it for an ugly one. - King Amor