Things happen to people by accident, she used to say. A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It jus...
Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling...
The very fact that she never made an impudent answer seemed to Miss Minchin a kind of impudence in itself.
The strong and strange thing—that which moves on its way as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun—had begun to move in them. It was no new and rare thing, but an ancient and common...
The stillness seemed to hold her and she paused to hear and feel it.
The same day, he took Sara out and bought her a great many beautiful clothes—clothes so grand and rich that only a very young and inexperienced man would have bought them for a mite of a child who was...
That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic—being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me—the Magic is in me.
Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.Lavinia could not think of exactly the right thing to say. Several times she had found that she...
She said that perhaps it was not so easy to be very rich; that if any one had so many things always, one might sometimes forget that every one else was not so fortunate, and that one who is rich shoul...
She just flew at him like a little cat last night, and stamped her feet and ordered him to stop screaming, and somehow she startled him so that he actually did stop, and this afternoon—well just come...
She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything;
She had never felt sorry for herself; she had only felt tired and cross, because she disliked people and things so much.
She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to anyone
Poor little thin, sallow, ugly Mary—she actually looked almost pretty for a moment.
Perhaps when her eyes closed the sultriness of the night had changed to the momentary freshness of the turning dawn,
People never like me and I never like people,’ she thought. ‘And I never can talk as the other children could. They were always talking and laughing and making noises.
Papa won’t be very long now, she said. May we talk about the lost little girl?I don’t think I could talk much about anything else just now, the Indian gentleman answered, knitting his forehead with a...
One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah. W...
Oh, papa! she cried. There is Emily!A flush had risen to her face and there was an expression in her green-gray eyes as if she had just recognized someone she was intimate with and fond of. She is act...
Oh, Donald, (this was Guy Clarence’s name), Janet exclaimed alarmedly, why did you offer that little girl your sixpence? I’m sure she is not a beggar!She didn’t speak like a beggar! cried Nora. And he...