Quotes from Frances Hodgson Burnett

It was really a very simple thing, after all,—it was only that he had lived near a kind and gentle heart, and had been taught to think kind thoughts always and to care for others. It is a very little thing, perhaps, but it is the best thing of all. He knew nothing of earls and castles; he was quite ignorant of all grand and splendid things; but he was always lovable because he was simple and loving. To be so is like being born a king.

The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

To see each of his ugly, selfish motives changed into a good and generous one by the simplicity of a child was a singular experience.

She is always starving for new books to gobble

It was a way of hers always to want to spring into any fray in which someone was made uncomfortable or unhappy.

No one will remember you.

And they began to laugh over nothings as children will when they are happy together.

If tha' was a missel thrush an' showed me where thy nest was, does tha' think I'd tell any one? Not me," he said. "Tha' art as safe as a missel thrush." And she was quite sure she was.

Suddenly it seemed as if he might a sort of wood fairy who might be gone when she came into the garden again. He seemed too good to be true.

Non, monsieur. Je n'ai pas le canif de mon oncle.' That

so red, indeed, that she almost looked as if tears were coming into her poor, dull, childish eyes;

I don't think it would be good if they stayed always

when Miss St. John called "le bon pain," "lee bong pang.

There was a clean fresh scent of heather and grass and leaves about him, almost as if he were made of them.

Por más harapos y jirones que vista, en mi interior puedo seguir siendo una princesa. María Antonieta en prisión, vestida de negro e insultada por su pueblo, tuvo más altura que cuando todo iba bien en la corte de Versalles —seguía cavilando Sara —. Es fácil parecer una princesa vistiendo ropajes de paño dorado, pero conducirse como tal sin que nadie lo sospeche, eso sí que es un gran triunfo

It was a book about the French Revolution, and she was soon lost in a harrowing picture of the prisoners in the Bastille—men who had spent so many years in dungeons that when they were dragged out by those who rescued them, their long, gray hair and beards almost hid their faces, and they had forgotten that an outside world existed at all, and were like beings in a dream.

Lo considero un amigo, a veces sucede que se puede estimar a una persona aunque nunca se haya hablado con ella. Se las observa y se piensa en ellas, y se comparten sus preocupaciones.

And the sun fell warm upon his face like a hand with a lovely touch.

I've stolen a garden. It isn't mine, it isn't anybody's. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already, I don't know. I don't care, I don't care. Nobody has any right to take it from me when I care about it and they don't. They're letting it die, all shut in by itsellf!

I've seen the spring now and I'm going to see the summer. I'm going to see everything grow here. I'm going to grow here myself. That

If there was time only for a few words, they were always friendly, merry words that put heart into one; and if there was time for more, then there was an installment of a story to be told, or some other thing one remembered afterward and sometimes lay awake in one's bed in the attic to think over.

I don't want to be queer, and I'm not going to be. I'll shall stop being queer if I go every day to the garden. There is magic in there...

only doing what she unconsciously liked better than anything else

Where you tend a rose, a thistle cannot grow.