Top 250 Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I’m lonely,” she said. She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

102. “Adversity tries people, and mine has tried you and proved how nice you are.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

103. “Two lads an’ a little lass just lookin’ on at th’ springtime. I warrant it’d be better than doctor’s stuff.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

104. “What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

105. “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!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

106. “It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

107. “That’s what I look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think them over afterward.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

108. “When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

110. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

111. “Do you understand everything birds say?” said Mary. Dickon’s grin spread until he seemed all wide, red, curving mouth, and he rubbed his rough head. “I think I do, and they think I do,” he said. “I’ve lived on th’ moor with ’em so long. I’ve watched ’em break shell an’ come out an’ fledge an’ learn to fly an’ begin to sing, till I think I’m one of ’em. Sometimes I think p’raps I’m a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a beetle, an’ I don’t know it.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

112. “She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

113. “Don’t let us make it tidy,” said Mary anxiously. “It wouldn’t seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

114. “Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

115. “Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

116. “The magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man. I am going to make the scientific experiment of trying to get some and put it in myself and make it push and draw me and make me strong. I don’t know how to do it, but I think that if you keep thinking about it and calling it perhaps it will come.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

117. “Whatever comes cannot alter one thing.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

118. “When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

119. “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...”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

120. “That afternoon the whole world seemed to devote itself to being perfect and radiantly beautiful and kind to one boy.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

121. “It’s so easy that when you begin you can’t stop. You just go on and on doing it always.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

122. “If she had cried and sobbed and seemed frightened, Miss Minchin might almost have had more patience with her. She was a woman who liked to domineer and feel her power, and as she looked at Sara’s pale little steadfast face and heard her proud little voice, she felt quite as if her mind was being set at naught.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

123. “The very fact that she never made an impudent answer seemed to Miss Minchin a kind of impudence in itself.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

124. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

125. “You are real, aren’t you?” he said. “I have such real dreams very often. You might be one of them.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

126. “It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

127. “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

128. “She would never tell him and he could stay in his room and never get any fresh air and die if he liked!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

129. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

130. “Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young. They’re still princesses.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

131. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

132. “If you have never had a garden you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

133. “She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself. She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

134. “Things happen to people by accident.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

135. “Dr. Warren was of the mental build of the man whose life would be interesting and full of outlook if it were spent on a desert island or in the Bastille.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

136. “It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem wholly impersonal. There are times when the whole world is personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all things. Words are of small moment when the mere sound of a voice makes an unreasonable joy.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

138. “Neither do I – to speak truth. But I suppose there might be good in things, even if we don’t see it.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

139. “That’s almost like telling lies,” she said. “And lies – well, you see, they are not only wicked – they’re vulgar.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

140. “I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out: ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say: ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me, and set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

141. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

142. “And delight reigned.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

143. “She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything;.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

144. “A body ‘as to move gentle an’ speak low when wild things is about.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

145. “Dickon says anything will understand if you’re friends with it for sure, but you have to be friends for sure.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

147. “If you tell stories, you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to listen.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

148. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

149. “The same day, he took Sara out and bought her a great many beautiful clothes – clothes so grand and rich that only a very young and inexperienced man would have bought them for a mite of a child who was to be brought up in a boarding-school. But the fact was that he was a rash, innocent young man, and very sad at the thought of parting with his little girl, who was all he had left to remind him of her beautiful mother, whom he had dearly loved.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

150. “When I lie by myself and remember I begin to have pains everywhere and I think of things that make me begin to scream because I hate them so. If there was a doctor anywhere who could make you forget you were ill instead of remembering it I would have him brought here.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett