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.

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

It's so easy that when you begin you can't stop. You just go on and on doing it always.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too . . . she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.

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. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

The air was full of spices... A Little Princess