Quotes from Frances Hodgson Burnett

She had learned to know how comforting a smile, even from a stranger, may be.

I wouldn't want to make it look like a gardener's garden, all clipped an' spick an' span, would you?" he said. "It's nicer like this with things runnin' wild, an' swingin' an' catchin' hold of each other." "Don't let us make it tidy," said Mary anxiously. "It wouldn't seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.

It will be like a story from the Arabian Nights, he said. Only an Oriental could have planned it. It does not belong to London fogs.

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 some one.

Th' world's full o' jackasses brayin' an' they never bray nowt but lies.

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. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen.

If Mary Lennox had been a child who was ready to be amused she would perhaps have laughed at Martha's readiness to talk, but Mary only listened to her coldly and wondered at her freedom of manner.

Perhaps it is the key to the garden!

Why," she said, "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!

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...

I am growing quite fond of him," she said to Ermengarde; "I should not like him to be disturbed. I have adopted him for a friend. You can do that with people you never speak to at all. You can just watch them, and think about them and be sorry for them, until they seem almost like relations. I'm quite anxious sometimes when I see the doctor call twice a day.

It had never occurred to his honest, simple little mind that there were people who could forget kindnesses.

Mother says as th' two worst things as can happen to a child is never have his own way-- or always to have it. She doesn't know which is th' worst.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been

How is it 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.

nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them--the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs...if an Egg were to be taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end...

Nothing in the world is so strong as a kind heart

There is nothing so nice as supposing. It's almost like being a fairy. If you suppose anything hard enough it seems as if it were real.

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.

Tis a barbaric fancy, said Roxholm thoughtfully as he turned the stem of his glass, keeping his eyes fixed on it as though solving a problem for himself. A barbaric fancy that a woman needs a master. She who is strong enough is her own conqueror--as a man should be master of himself.

All that I do is right—for me. I make it so by doing it. Do you think that I am conquered by the laws that other women crouch and whine before, because they dare not break them, though they long to do so? I am my own law—and the law of some others.

Soldiers don't complain," she would say between her small, shut teeth, "I am not going to do it; I will pretend this is part of a war.

Dearest says that is the best kind of goodness; not to think about yourself, but to think about other people.

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.