非常喜欢的小书，如果是小时候读可能会更书呆子吧哈哈哈。玛蒂尔达在这样的环境里长大还能正直，勇敢，乐于助人非常激励人，近年来流行的什么『原生家庭』问题很多时候我觉得是成年人的一种借口，尤其是看到这样的一个小孩子还能『出淤泥而不染』之时。所以当处于不好的环境或境遇中时，不要怨天尤人，抱怨这抱怨那，自怜自叹，勇敢地行动起来吧！
scorcher: [British English] a remarkable or extreme example of something
If I were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents.
chastened: punish
The experience had clearly chastened Mr. Wormwood and he seemed temporarily to have lost his taste for boasting and bullying.
asinine: extremely stupid or foolish
But the fact remained that any five-year-old girl in any family was always obliged to do as she was told, however asinine the orders might be.
Limerick: a humorous, frequently bawdy, verse of three long and two short lines rhyming aabba, popularized by Edward Lear.
Example:
An epicure dining at Crewe
Found a rather large mouse in his stew
Cried the waiter, "Don't shout
And wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too
replete: filled or well-supplied with something
comatose: of or in a state of deep unconsciousness for a prolonged or indefinite period, especially as a result of severe injury or illness
She glared at Bruce Bogtrotter who was sitting on his chair like some huge overstuffed grub, replete, comatose, unable to move or to speak.
Fiona has the same glacial beauty as an iceberg, but unlike the iceberg she has absolutely nothing below the surface.
Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.
She seemed to know that neither crying nor sulking ever got anyone anywhere. The only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter-attack.
Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.
But children of their age do not search deeply for reasons. They are far too wrapped up in their own small struggles to worry overmuch about what others are doing and why.
Miss Honey marveled at the child's lack of conceit and self-consciousness.
A poem by Dylan Thomas
Never and never, my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in the sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap, my dear, my dear,
Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.
The whole object of life, Headmistress, is to go forwards.