Quotes from Frances Hodgson Burnett

I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young. They're still princesses.

It made her think that it was curious how much nicer a person looked when he smiled. She had not thought of it before.

Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world," he said wisely one day, "but people don't know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.

And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.

Perhaps to be able to learn things quickly isn't everything. To be kind is worth a great deal to other people...Lots of clever people have done harm and have been wicked.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.

Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. 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. In this garden - in all the places.

When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word -- just to look at them and think. When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wished they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in -- that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies.

However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.

Somehow, something always happens just before things get to the very worst. It is as if Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worse thing never quite comes.

Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.

Hang in there. It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen.

What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.

Her affection for everything she could love increased.

we do not believe until we want a thing and feel that we shall die if 'tis not granted to us, and then we kneel and kneel and believe, because we must have someone to ask help from.

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done-then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

Soldiers don't complain...I am not going to do it; I will pretend this is part of a war.

All women are princesses , it is our right.

death is always sudden however long one waits.

If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.

We do not believe until we want a thing and feel that we shall die if it is not granted to us and then we kneel and believe.

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

As long as one has a garden, one has a future. As long as one has a future, one is alive.