Best 129 quotes of Frances Hodgson Burnett on MyQuotes

If you keep doing it everyday as regularly as soldiers go through drill, we shall see what will happend and find out if the experiment succeeds. You learn things by saying them over and over and thinking about them until they stay in your mind for ever, and I think it will be the same with Magic. If you keep calling it to come to you and help you, it will get to be part of you and it will stay and do things.

I know what it is to be hungry, and it is very hard when one cannot even pretend it away. -Sara

In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light.

It's a lonely place. Sometimes it's the loneliest place in the world.

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.

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.

Might I,” quavered Mary, “might I have a bit of earth?” In her eagerness she did not realize how queer the words would sound and that they were not the ones she had meant to say. Mr. Craven looked quite startled. “Earth!” he repeated. “What do you mean?” “To plant seeds in—to make things grow—to see them come alive,” Mary faltered. He gazed at her a moment and then passed his hand quickly over his eyes. “Do you—care about gardens so much,” he said slowly. “I didn’t know about them in India,” said Mary. “I was always ill and tired and it was too hot. I sometimes made little beds in the sand and stuck flowers in them. But here it is different.” Mr. Craven got up and began to walk slowly across the room. “A bit of earth,” he said to himself, and Mary thought that somehow she must have reminded him of something. When he stopped and spoke to her his dark eyes looked almost soft and kind. “You can have as much earth as you want,” he said. “You remind me of some one else who loved the earth and things that grow. When you see a bit of earth you want,” with something like a smile, “take it, child, and make it come alive.

…Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latch-key in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view.

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. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage. "It makes me feel as if something had hit me," Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. "And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered.

...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...

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.

One of her favorite fancies was that on “the outside”, as she called it, thoughts were waiting for people to call them.

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 in you may never get over it as long as you live... 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.

One of the strangest things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live for ever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender, solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange, unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun - which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.

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

She had never been taught to ask permission to do things, and she knew nothing at all about authority, so she would not have thought it necessary to ask Mrs. Medlock if she might walk about the house, even if she had seen her.

Sólo muy de vez en cuando se puede estar seguro de que se va a vivir para siempre jamás, y ésa es una de las curiosidades de la vida. A veces sucede cuando uno se levanta al amanecer, ese momento de meliflua solemnidad, y se sale al jardín y se queda uno allí quieto y solo; y se levanta mucho la mirada, más y más arriba, y se observa cómo muda de color el pálido cielo azul, sonrojándose, cómo va sucediendo lo insólito y maravilloso, hasta que el Oriente casi le hace a uno clamar, y el corazón parece que cesara de latir ante la inexplicable, imperturbable majestad del sol naciente. Desde hace miles y miles de años, esto es lo que acontece cada mañana, y es entonces cuando durante un instante se sabe que uno va a vivir siempre.

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...

The great strength she had used in the old days to conquer and subdue, to win her will and to defend her way, seemed now a power but to protect the suffering and uphold the weak, and this she did, not alone in hovels but in the brilliant court and world of fashion, for there she found suffering and weakness also, all the more bitter and sorrowful since it dared not cry aloud.

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.

The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.

The sun is shining - the sun is shining. That is the Magic. The flower are growing - the roots are stirring. That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic - being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me - the Magic is in me. It is in me - it is in me. In every one of us.

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.

Trataré de descubrir qué significa para mi la magia pues creo que hay magia en todo lo que nos rodea.

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 that you're mistaken, an' you won't find it out without hard knocks.

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!

you are going to be sent home.... I 'm glad of it but where's HOME ?

You said th' Magic was in my back. Th' doctor calls it rheumatics.