“She looked into the staring glass eyes and complacent face, and suddenly a sort of heartbroken rage seized her. She lifted her little savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair, bursting into a passion of sobbing- Sara who never cried.”

“Sara...looked long and hard at his face.'Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?' he said...'No,' she answered. 'I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.”

“Lottie was so delighted that she quite forgot her first shocked impression of the attic. In fact, when she was lifted down from the table and returned to earthly things, as it were, Sara was able to point out to her many beauties in the room which she herself would not have suspected the existence of.”

“Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?" he said, stroking her hair."No," she answered. "I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.”

“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.”

“If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago, her father used to say, 'she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.”

“The mere seeing of Miss Sara would have been enough without meat pies. If there was time only for a few words, they were always friendly, merry words that put heart into one...Sara--who was only doing what she unconsciously liked better than anything else, Nature having made her for a giver--had not the least idea what she meant to poor Becky, and how wonderful a benefactor she seemed.”