“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.”

“Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.”

“She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them?”

“The books awed her by size, thickness, the staggering mass of lines and words to read before she could read all of them. Then having read all of the books must she carry in her head all that knowledge from the books? This too staggered her. "Wouldn't my head feel queer?" she asked Elder Brewster. "Wouldn't my head feel heavy carrying so much knowledge? Could any of it spill out if there was too much?”

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time agoI met a little girl with a book under her arm.I asked her why she was out so early andshe answered that there were too many books andfar too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”

“She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy, trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.”