Quotes from Frances Hodgson Burnett

As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive.

She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of, and what you do.

Oh, how she did love that queer, common boy!

Never thee stop believin' in th' Big Good Thing an' knowin' th' world's full of it - and call it what tha' likes. Tha' wert singin' to it when I come into t' garden.

Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world, but people don't know what it is like or how to make it.

Yes, answered Sara, nodding. Adversity tries people, and mine has tried you and proved how nice you are.

The truth is that when one is still a child-or even if one is grown up- and has been well fed, and has slept long and softly and warm; when one has gone to sleep in the midst of a fairy story, and has wakened to find it real, one cannot be unhappy or even look as if one were; and one could not, if one tried, keep a glow of joy out of one's eyes.

If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago, her father used to say, 'she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.

Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.

He had made himself believe that he was going to get well, which was really more than half the battle.

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.

You can lose a friend in springtime easier than any other season if you're too curious.

Perhaps you can feel if you can't hear. Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls. Perhaps you feel a little warm and comforted.

That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic—being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me—the Magic is in me.

And they both began to laugh over nothing as children will when they are happy together. And they laughed so that in the end they were making as much noise as if they had been two ordinary healthy natural ten-year-old creatures—instead of a hard, little, unloving girl and a sickly boy who believed that he was going to die.

It's so easy that when you begin you can't stop. You just go on and on doing it always.

I don't know who it is, she said; but somebody cares for me a little. I have a friend.

It's true, she said. Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

If nature has made you a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart. And though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that.

She looked into the staring glass eyes and complacent face, and suddenly a sort of heartbroken rage seized her. She lifted her little savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair, bursting into a passion of sobbing- Sara who never cried.

One marvel of a day he had walked so far that when he returned the moon was high and full and all the world was purple shadow and silver.

How does thee like thyself?

Between the lines of every story there is another story, and that is one that is never heard and can only be guessed at by the people who are good at guessing.