Quotes from Frances Hodgson Burnett

Mistress Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With Silver Bells, and Cockle Shells, And marigolds all in a row.

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

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

That's what I look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think them over afterward.

Mistress Mary Quite Contrary

Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? Perhaps I'm a HIDEOUS child, and no one will ever know, just beecause I never have any trials. (Sara Crewe, A Little Princess)

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. I scarcely ever do.

She was a sweet, pretty thing and he'd have walked the world over to get her a blade o' grass she wanted.

Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place. Where, you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.

Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling...

I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.

At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.

But the calm had brought a sort of courage and hope with it. Instead of giving way to thoughts of the worst, he actually found he was trying to believe in better things.

She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to anyone

If I go on talking and talking...and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don't forget, but you bear it better.

Adversity tries people, and mine has tried you and proved how nice you are.

Whatever comes cannot alter one thing.

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts- just mere thoughts- are as powerful as electric batteries- as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got you in you may never get over it as long as you live.

Magic is in her just as it is in Dickon, said Colin. It makes her think of ways to do things - nice things.

I do not know whether many people realize how much more than is ever written there really is in a story— how many parts of it are never told— how much more really happened than there is in the book one holds in one's hand and pores over.

When I am telling it, it doesn't seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are -- more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story -- one after the other. It is queer.

Oh,Sara. It is like a story. It is a story...everything is a story. You are a story-I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.

I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sence enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us - like electricity and horses and steam.