Top 250 Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic – being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me – the Magic is in me.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

52. “It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

53. “She was a sweet, pretty thing and he’d have walked the world over to get her a blade o’ grass she wanted.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

54. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

55. “It’s true,” she said. “Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

56. “She said that perhaps it was not so easy to be very rich; that if any one had so many things always, one might sometimes forget that every one else was not so fortunate, and that one who is rich should always be careful and try to remember.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

57. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

58. “It IS a story,” said Sara. “EVERYTHING’S a story. You are a story – I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

59. “Poor little thin, sallow, ugly Mary – she actually looked almost pretty for a moment.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

60. “Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling...”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

61. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

62. “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. Colin.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

63. “Give her books, and she would devour them and end by knowing them by heart.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

64. “The robin was tremendously busy. He was very much pleased to see gardening begun on his own estate. He had often wondered at Ben Weatherstaff. Where gardening is done all sorts of delightful things to eat are turned up with the soil. Now here was this new kind of creature who was not half Ben’s size and yet had had the sense to come into his garden and begin at once.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

65. “It was a way of hers always to want to spring into any fray in which someone was made uncomfortable or unhappy.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

66. “You learn things by saying them over and over and thinking about them until they stay in your mind forever 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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

67. “The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off – and they are nearly always doing it.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

69. “Th’ world’s full o’ jackasses brayin’ an’ they never bray nowt but lies.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

70. “She had never felt sorry for herself; she had only felt tired and cross, because she disliked people and things so much.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

71. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

72. “The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

73. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. “When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word – just to look at them and think. 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 wished they hadn’t said afterward. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in – that’s stronger. It’s a good thing not to answer your enemies.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

75. “But I suppose there might be good in things, even if we don’t see it.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

76. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

77. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

78. “If I was a princess-a real princess,” she murmured, “I could scatter largess to the populace. But even if i am only a pretend princess, I can invent little things to do for the people. Things like this. She was just as happy as if it was largess. I’ll pretend that doing things that people like is scattering largess. I’ve scattered largess.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

79. “Mrs. Craven was a very lovely young lady,” he had gone on rather hesitatingly. “An’ mother she thinks maybe she’s about Misselthwaite many a time lookin’ after Mester Colin, same as all mothers do when they’re took out o’ th’ world. They have to come back, tha’ sees. Happen she’s been in the garden an’ happen it was her set us to work, an’ told us to bring him here.” Mary.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

80. “He had made himself believe that he was going to get well, which was really more than half the battle.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

81. “And that is best of all, Ceddie, – it is better than everything else, that the world should be a little better because a man has lived – even ever so little better, dearest.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

82. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

83. “One marvel of a day he had walked so far that when he returned the moon was high and full and all the world was purple shadow and silver.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

84. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

85. “She wished she could talk as he did. His speech was so quick and easy. It sounded as if he liked her and was not the least afraid she would not like him, though he was only a common moor boy, in patched clothes and with a funny face and a rough, rusty-red head.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

86. “All girls are! Even if they live in tiny old attics, even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young, they’re still princesses – all of us! Didn’t your father ever tell you that? Didn’t he?”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

87. “I do not know whether many people realize how much more than is ever written there really is in a story – how many parts of it are never told – how much more really happened than there is in the book one holds in one’s hand and pores over.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

88. “If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago, her father used to say, ’she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

89. “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. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in – that’s stronger.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

90. “Then I will chant,” he said. And he began, looking like a strange boy spirit. “The sun is shining – the sun is shining. That is the Magic. The flowers 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. It’s in every one of us. It’s in Ben Weatherstaff’s back. Magic! Magic! Come and help!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

91. “As she stood on the stone floor she looked a very small, odd little black figure, and she felt as small and lost and odd as she looked.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

92. “She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to anyone.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

93. “There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in – that’s stronger.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

94. “She was all in pink, and a wreath of little pink wild roses lay close about her head, making her, with her tall young slimness, look like a Botticelli nymph.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

95. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

97. “Dickon’s a kind lad an’ animals likes him.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

99. “But she was inside the wonderful garden, and she could come through the door under the ivy any time, and she felt as if she had found a world all her own.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

100. “When a man is overcome by anger, he has a poisoned fever. He loses his strength, he loses his power over himself and over others. He throws away time in which he might have gained the end he desires. The is no time for anger in the world. – The Ancient One.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett