Quotes from Frances Hodgson Burnett

They're a pair of young Satans.

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 wish they hadn't said afterward.

Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls. Perhaps you feel a little warm and comforted, and don't know why, when I am standing here in the cold and hoping you will get well and happy again.

Don't let us make it tidy, said Mary anxiously. It wouldn't seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.

And over walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above his head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents.

stories belong to everybody.

There was something friendly about Sara, and people always felt it.

You are nothing but a doll. Nothing but a doll -- doll -- doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust. You never had a heart. Nothing could ever make you feel. You are a doll!

It IS a story, said Sara. EVERYTHING'S a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.

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.

Why, we are just the same - I am only a little girl like you. It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!

He found her under my care," she protested. "I have done everything for her. But for me she should have starved in the streets." Here the Indian gentleman lost his temper. "As to starving in the streets," he said, "she might have starved more comfortably there than in your attic.

I wish I was friends with things, he said at last, but I'm not. I never had anything to be friends with, and I can't bear people.

Perhaps, she said, to be able to learn things quickly isn't everything. To be kind is worth a great deal to other people.

The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man.

The mere fact that Lottie had come and gone away again made things seem a little worse-just as perhaps prisoners feel a little more desolate after visitors come and go, leaving them behind.

the paths and down the avenue, she was stirring her slow blood and making herself stronger

Dickon says anything will understand if you're friends with it for sure, but you have to be friends for sure.

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

Her affection for everything she could love increased.

When a man looks at the stars, he grows calm and forgets small things. They answer his questions and show him that his earth is only one of the million worlds. Hold your soul still and look upward often, and you will understand their speech. Never forget the stars.

Two lads an' a little lass just lookin' on at th' springtime. I warrant it'd be better than doctor's stuff.

And the roses—the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.

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- warm things, kind things, sweet things-help and comfort and laughter- and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.