Top 250 Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If you tell stories, you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to listen.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “The afternoon was dragging towards its mellow hour. The sun was deepening the gold of its lances, the bees were going home and the birds were flying past less often.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

156. “She could not be made rude and malicious by the rudeness and malice of those about her.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

157. “Her affection for everything she could love increased.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

158. “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 someone.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

159. “There is naught a man or woman can not learn who hath the wit.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

160. “People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

161. “So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

162. “Non, monsieur. Je n’ai pas le canif de mon oncle.‘” That.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

163. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

164. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

166. “When a man is very good and knows a great deal, he is elected president.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

167. “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.”- Page. 164.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

168. “She was so happy that she scarcely dared to breathe.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

169. “It was a vague belief that she herself was not quite real – or that she did not belong to the life she had been born into.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

170. “In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

171. “She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

172. “And it was then he spoke about the broken Link – and about the greatest books in the world – that in all their different ways, they were only saying over and over again one thing thousands of times. Just this thing – ‘Hate not, Fear not, Love.’ And he said that was Order. And when it was disturbed, suffering came – poverty and misery and catastrophe and wars.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

173. “How does tha’ like thysel’?” she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

174. “She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for any one.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

175. “One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah. “Why did you.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

176. “I’ve stolen a garden. It isn’t mine, it isn’t anybody’s. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already, I don’t know. I don’t care, I don’t care. Nobody has any right to take it from me when I care about it and they don’t. They’re letting it die, all shut in by itsellf!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

177. “Comme elle est drole!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

178. “To see each of his ugly, selfish motives changed into a good and generous one by the simplicity of a child was a singular experience.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

179. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise Him all creatures here below, Praise Him above ye Heavenly Host, Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

180. “I wouldn’t want to make it look like a gardener’s garden, all clipped an’ spick an’ span, would you?” he said. “It’s nicer like this with things runnin’ wild, an’ swingin’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other.” “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

181. “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

182. “She went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed herself so immensely that she was led on from bed to bed and into the grass under the trees. The exercise made her so warm that she first threw her coat off, and then her hat, and without knowing it she was smiling down on to the grass and the pale green points all the time.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

183. “I shall live forever and ever and ever!” he cried grandly. “I shall find out thousands and thousands of things. I shall find out about people and creatures and everything that grows – like Dickon – and I shall never stop making Magic. I’m well! I’m well! I feel – I feel as if I want to shout out something – something thankful, joyful!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

184. “But the earth is full of magic,” Amor said to the Ancient One, after the feast on the plain was over. “Most men know nothing of it and so comes misery. The first law of the earth’s magic is this one. If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought there will be no room in it for an ugly one.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

185. “Da quando sono nato, non ho mai preso un raffreddore. Sono sempre stato in giro per la brughiera con ogni tempo, come i conigli. La mamma dice che ho respirato troppa aria fresca, in dodici anni, per poter prendere il raffreddore. Sono robusto come il nodo di un ramo di biancospino.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

186. “It was really a very simple thing, after all, – it was only that he had lived near a kind and gentle heart, and had been taught to think kind thoughts always and to care for others. It is a very little thing, perhaps, but it is the best thing of all. He knew nothing of earls and castles; he was quite ignorant of all grand and splendid things; but he was always lovable because he was simple and loving. To be so is like being born a king.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

187. “I’ve seen the spring now and I’m going to see the summer. I’m going to see everything grow here. I’m going to grow here myself.” “That.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

188. “Everything as strange and silent, and she seemed to be hundreds of miles away from anyone, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

189. “Mrs. Medlock, knowing Ben had come from the gardens, hoped that he might have caught sight of his master and even by chance of his meeting with Master Colin. “Did you see either of them, Weatherstaff?” she asked.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

190. “To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land – which on dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

191. “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people – they’re servants who must salaam to you. You know nothing about India. You know nothing about anything!”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

192. “Ben Weatherstaff.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

193. “Sara curled herself up in the window-seat, opened a book, and began to read. It was a book about the French Revolution, and she was soon lost in a harrowing picture of the prisoners in the Bastille – men who had spent so many years in dungeons that when they were dragged out by those who rescued them, their long, gray hair and beards almost hid their faces, and they had forgotten that an outside world existed at all, and were like beings in a dream. She was so far away from the schoolroom that.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

194. “It’s not your fault that you are stupid.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

195. “She is hungrier than I am,” she said to herself. “She’s starving.” But her hand trembled when she put down the fourth bun. “I’m not starving,” she said – and she put down the fifth.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

196. “You don’t know that you are saying these things to a princess, and that if I chose I could wave my hand and order you to execution. I only spare you because I am a princess, and you are a poor, stupid, old, vulgar thing, and don’t know any better.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

197. “There was a clean fresh scent of heather and grass and leaves about him, almost as if he were made of them.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

198. “I like you! I like you!” she cried out, pattering down the walk; and she chirped and tried to whistle, which last she did not know how to do in the least. But the robin seemed to be quite satisfied and chirped and whistled back at her.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

199. “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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

200. “Now you are a great deal fatter and better looking.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett