"When I was your age, I read voraciously, plied my teachers for scraps of information that lay ahead in the curriculum, beseeched the permission of the librarians to bring texts home over the summers. To me, knowledge was still miraculous, still perfect in my mind."

"I've seen it in many of my peers," he went on, "It was as if knowledge had lost its novelty for these immature little fools, like the gloss or paint chipped from a toy." He shook his head, and his lip curled into a sneer. "They treat it as schoolwork, the means to get marks. A Distinction, Pass, Fail. And all I thought of them was - pathetic."

 - adapted from http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3672254/3/To-Define-Treachery