Top 280 James M. Barrie Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

— James M. Barrie

152. “Yet if he upbraided her in his hurry, it was to repent bitterly his temper the next, and to feel its effects more than she, temper being a weapon that we hold by the blade.”

— James M. Barrie

153. “The best place a person can die, is where they die for others.”

— James M. Barrie

154. “The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to hime make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.”

— James M. Barrie

155. “Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened, but woke is better and was always used by Peter.”

— James M. Barrie

156. “What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.”

— James M. Barrie

157. “Heaven for climate, Hell for company.”

— James M. Barrie

158. “May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.”

— James M. Barrie

159. “Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them.”

— James M. Barrie

160. “Would you like an adventure now,” he said casually to John, “or would you like to have your tea first?”

— James M. Barrie

161. “Every man who is high up likes to think he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that. It’s our only joke. Every woman knows that.”

— James M. Barrie

162. “Tink was not all bad: or, rather, she was all bad just now, but, on the other hand, sometimes she was all good. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change.”

— James M. Barrie

163. “All you need is trust and a little bit of pixie dust!”

— James M. Barrie

164. “In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.”

— James M. Barrie

165. “To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze.”

— James M. Barrie

166. “Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...”

— James M. Barrie

167. “It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.”

— James M. Barrie

168. “Boy,” she said courteously, “why are you crying?”

— James M. Barrie

169. “I do loathe explanations.”

— James M. Barrie

170. “I say, Wendy,” he whispered to her, “always if you see me forgetting you, just keep on saying ‘I’m Wendy,’ and then I’ll remember.”

— James M. Barrie

171. “Forget not your past, for in the future it may help you grow.”

— James M. Barrie

172. “One could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing, it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.”

— James M. Barrie

173. “They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate.”

— James M. Barrie

174. “A woman can be anything the man who loves her would have her be.”

— James M. Barrie

175. “You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls.”

— James M. Barrie

176. “There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”

— James M. Barrie

177. “There are, I dare say, many lovers who would never have been drawn to each other had they met for the first time, as, say, they met the second time.”

— James M. Barrie

178. “They took it for granted that if they went he would go also, but really they scarcely cared. Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.”

— James M. Barrie

179. “They knew in what they called their hearts that one can get on quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can’t.”

— James M. Barrie

180. “All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”

— James M. Barrie

181. “I bowl so slowly that if I don’t like a ball I can run after it and bring it back.”

— James M. Barrie

182. “Mr. and Mrs. Darling and Nana rushed into the nursery too late. The birds were flown.”

— James M. Barrie

183. “There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.”

— James M. Barrie

184. “When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can’t write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy.”

— James M. Barrie

185. “How clever I am,′ he crowed rapturously, ’oh, the cleverness of me!”

— James M. Barrie

186. “We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.”

— James M. Barrie

187. “Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.”

— James M. Barrie

188. “Certainly they did not pretend to be sleepy, they were sleepy; and that was a danger, for the moment they popped off, down they fell. The awful thing was that Peter found this funny. “There he goes again!” he would cry gleefully as Michael suddenly dropped like a stone.”

— James M. Barrie

189. “Strength instead of being the lusty child of passion, grows by grappling with and subduing them.”

— James M. Barrie

190. “Odds bobs, hammer and tongs I’m burning.”

— James M. Barrie

191. “Have you noticed that many jewels make women either incredibly fat or incredibly thin?”

— James M. Barrie

192. “Never, never!” she answered with conviction, “he would have been afraid.” “What is afraid?” asked Peter longingly. He thought it must be some splendid thing. “I do wish you would teach me how to be afraid, Maimie,” he said.”

— James M. Barrie

193. “They were his dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had become, he scarcely heeded them. Against such fearful evidence it was not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own. He felt his ego slipping from him.”

— James M. Barrie

194. “You won’t forget me, Peter, will you, before spring-cleaning time comes? Of course Peter promised, and then he flew away. He took Mrs. Darling’s kiss with him. The kiss that had been for no one else Peter took quite easily. Funny. But she seemd satisfied.”

— James M. Barrie

195. “I have seen him climbing a tree while she stood beneath him in unutterable anguish; she had to let him climb, for boys must be brave, but I am sure that, as she watched him, she fell from every branch.”

— James M. Barrie

196. “After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.”

— James M. Barrie

197. “Courage: The lovely virtue-the rib of Himself that God sent down to His children.”

— James M. Barrie

198. “The very smell of tobacco is abominable, for one cannot get it out of the curtains, and there is little pleasure in existence unless the curtains are all right.”

— James M. Barrie

199. “Why, what is the matter, father dear?′ ‘Matter!’ he yelled; he really yelled. ‘This tie, it will not tie.”

— James M. Barrie

200. “She saw them, but did not believe they were there. You see, she saw them so often in their beds in her dreams that she thought this was just the dream hanging around her still.”

— James M. Barrie