Frances Hodgson Burnett
27 quotes
Biography
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).
"If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden."
"Whatever comes,"she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it."
"If nature has made you for 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."
"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."
"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."
"Hang in there. It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen."
"She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself."
"Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book."
"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."
"If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought, there will be no room in it for an ugly one. - King Amor"
"Some very fine day/ I will step up your way,/ At least, if so you agree./ With two tales I've been writing, full of murders and fighting --/So I hope you'll be glad to seem me. (in a letter to her cousin in March, 1863)"
"Three thousand dollars would certainly have bought a house in Knoxville...I want my chestnuts off a higher bough. (in a letter to her sister Edith in April, 1876)"
"I hate & detest love stories, but it seems that you must have their grinning sentimental skeletons to hang your respectable humanity and drapery upon. (in a letter to her editor Richard Watson Gilder in summer, 1881)"
"Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too."
"So she began to feel a slight interest in Dickon, and as she had never before been interested in any one but herself, it was the dawning of a healthy sentiment."
"In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little."
"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 some one. She was getting on."
"Yorkshire’s th’ sunniest place on earth when it is sunny."
"“Eh!” he said, and as he crumbled the rich black soil she saw he was sniffing up the scent of it, “there doesn’t seem to be no need for no one to be contrary when there’s flowers an’ such like, an’ such lots o’ friendly wild things runnin’ about makin’ homes for themselves, or buildin’ nests an’ singin’ an’ whistlin’, does there?”"
"“The rain is as contrary as I ever was,” she said. “It came because it knew I did not want it.”"
"Ben Weatherstaff says he is so conceited he would rather have stones thrown at him than not be noticed."
"Mary’s lips pinched themselves together. She was no more used to considering other people than Colin was and she saw no reason why an ill-tempered boy should interfere with the thing she liked best. She knew nothing about the pitifulness of people who had been ill and nervous and who did not know that they could control their tempers and need not make other people ill and nervous, too. When she had had a headache in India she had done her best to see that everybody else also had a headache or something quite as bad. And she felt she was quite right; but of course now she felt that Colin was quite wrong."
"Eh! poor lad! He’s been spoiled till salt won’t save him. Mother says as th’ two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way—or always to have it. She doesn’t know which is th’ worst."
"“She’s got a way with her, has Susan,” she went on quite volubly. “I’ve been thinking all morning of one thing she said yesterday. She says, ’Once when I was givin’ th’ children a bit of a preach after they’d been fightin’ I ses to ’em all, “When I was at school my jography told as th’ world was shaped like a orange an’ I found out before I was ten that th’ whole orange doesn’t belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an’ there’s times it seems like there’s not enow quarters to go round. But don’t you—none o’ you—think as you own th’ whole orange or you’ll find out you’re mistaken, an’ you won’t find it out without hard knocks.” What children learns from children,’ she says, ’is that there’s no sense in grabbin’ at th’ whole orange—peel an’ all. If you do you’ll likely not get even th’ pips, an’ them’s too bitter to eat.’”"
"Then something began pushing things up out of the soil and making things out of nothing. One day things weren’t there and another they were. I had never watched things before and it made me feel very curious. Scientific people are always curious and I am going to be scientific. I keep saying to myself, ’What is it? What is it?’ It’s something. It can’t be nothing!"