The country lay bare and entirely lifeless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber...
He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple."
- The Wind in the Willows
(Mole headed into the Wild Wood)
"My adventures may be of interest because I started as a person absolutely unqualified for the work I was setting out to do. I use the word adventures advisedly, I really was, to start with, quite as much at sea as any merchant adventurer of Elizabethan times; my ideas as to my actual route vague indeed.
My aim was to hunt for treasure. My reward has been great gain."
"When we started our schoolroom hours were from nine o'clock to noon. ...I hope the hours do not seem discouragingly long. I have often wished them longer. There is so much to do and the work is so extraordinarily interesting that the time literally flies."
"...instruction and the amusement often become so intermingled that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins."
"The mother knows, or ought to know, what stage the child's mental development has reached- she can enter just as deeply as may be necessary into the [child's] question according to the stage of the child's development.
A mother who has taught her own children, or rather, who has read the same books and discussed problems and difficulties of various sorts, has an intellectual tie with her child's mind which strengthens as time passes."
- Adam of the Road