I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.

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.

The mug from the washstand was used as Becky's tea cup, and the tea was so delicious that it was not necessary to pretend that it was anything but tea.

There is naught a man or woman can not learn who hath the wit.

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

And they both began to laugh over nothing as children will when they are happy together. And they laughed so that in the end they were making as much noise as if they had been two ordinary healthy natural ten-year-old creatures—instead of a hard, little, unloving girl and a sickly boy who believed that he was going to die.