Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes

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

My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they’re rich and important.

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.

Children’s as good as ‘rithmetic to set you findin’ out things.

Everything’s a story – You are a story -I am a story.

In the garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves – 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 there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end… there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air.

Folks who make such a fuss about their rights turn them into wrongs sometimes. — (from Behind the White Brick)

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.

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.

To speak robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman

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.

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.