Top 280 James M. Barrie Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “He swore this terrible oath: “Hook or me this time.”

— James M. Barrie

202. “Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindnesses linger there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.”

— James M. Barrie

203. “Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest.”

— James M. Barrie

204. “It is very well to be able to write a book, but can you waggle your ears?”

— James M. Barrie

205. “Shoot the Wendybird!”

— James M. Barrie

206. “He was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland, that everytime you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them of vindictively as fast as possible.”

— James M. Barrie

207. “Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.”

— James M. Barrie

208. “One cannot at least withhold a reluctant admiration for the wit that had conceived so bold a scheme, and the fell genius with which it was carried out.”

— James M. Barrie

209. “If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon. This is the nearest you ever get to it on the mainland, just one heavenly moment; if there could be two moments you might see the surf and hear the mermaids singing.”

— James M. Barrie

210. “Life is like a cup of coffee: The more avidly you drink of it, the sooner you reach the dregs.”

— James M. Barrie

211. “It was the work of one brutal moment to land the beautiful girl on the rock; she was too proud to offer a vain resistance.”

— James M. Barrie

212. “I sometimes think, Mary, that it is a mistake to have a dog for a nurse.”

— James M. Barrie

213. “The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it.”

— James M. Barrie

214. “I can give you the power to fly to her house,” the Queen said, “but I can’t open the door for you.”

— James M. Barrie

215. “Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. 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

216. “For, to a child, the oddest of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his mother was once a child also.”

— James M. Barrie

217. “What if I fall oh but my darling what if you fly.”

— James M. Barrie

218. “Whenever a child says “I don’t believe in fairies” there’s a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.”

— James M. Barrie

219. “Oh, God, if I were sure I were to die tonight I would repent at once. It is the commonest prayer in all languages.”

— James M. Barrie

220. “Fairies don’t live long, but they are so little that a short time seems a good while to them.”

— James M. Barrie

221. “Two is the beginning of the end.”

— James M. Barrie

222. “If you knew how great is a mother’s love, you would have no fear.”

— James M. Barrie

223. “Come with me where dreams are born and time is never planned.”

— James M. Barrie

224. “Peter became very clever at helping the birds to build their nests; soon he could build better than a wood-pigeon, and nearly as well as a blackbird, though never did he satisfy the finches, and he made nice little water-troughs near the nests and dug up worms for the young ones with his fingers. He also became very learned in bird-lore, and knew an east wind from a west wind by its smell, and he could see the grass growing and hear the insects walking about inside the tree-trunks.”

— James M. Barrie

225. “My dog knows very little, but what little he does know he knows extraordinarily well.”

— James M. Barrie

226. “The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her.”

— James M. Barrie

227. “He was so much the humblest one that Wendy was especially gentle with him.”

— James M. Barrie

228. “He looked at her uncomfortably; blinking, you know, like one not sure whether he was awake or asleep.”

— James M. Barrie

229. “It is glorious fun racing down the Hump, but you can’t do it on windy days because then you are not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.”

— James M. Barrie

230. “Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt.”

— James M. Barrie

231. “His eyes were the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly. In manner, something of the great seigneur still clung to him, so that he even ripped you up with an air, and I have been told he was a raconteur of repute. He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding...”

— James M. Barrie

232. “Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all.”

— James M. Barrie

233. “Proud and insolent youth,” said Hook, “prepare to meet thy doom.” “Dark and sinister man,” Peter answered, “have at thee.”

— James M. Barrie

234. “Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal.”

— James M. Barrie

235. “The loveliest tinkle as of golden bells answered him. It is the fairy language.”

— James M. Barrie

236. “He was top-heavy with conceit.”

— James M. Barrie

237. “Nunca comprendemos lo poco que necesitamos en este mundo hasta que lo perdemos.”

— James M. Barrie

238. “All her tormentings of me turned suddenly into sweetnesses, and who could torment like this exquisite fury, wondering in sudden flame why she could give herself to anyone, while I wondered only why she could give herself to me. It may be that I wondered over-much. Perhaps that was why I lost her.”

— James M. Barrie

239. “Every child is thus affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy.”

— James M. Barrie

240. “Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage.”

— James M. Barrie

241. “He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding.”

— James M. Barrie

242. “Smee”, he said huskily, “that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock that goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I can hear the tick and bolt.” He laughed, but in a hollow way. “Some day”, Smee said, “the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.”

— James M. Barrie

243. “We were having another look among the bushes for David’s lost worsted ball, and instead of the ball we found a lovely nest made of the worsted, and containing four eggs, with scratches on them very like David’s handwriting, so we think they must have been the mother’s love-letters to the little ones inside.”

— James M. Barrie

244. “James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell. For we have come to his last moment.”

— James M. Barrie

245. “Avere fede vuol dire avere le ali.”

— James M. Barrie

246. “Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.”

— James M. Barrie

247. “A more villainous-looking lot never hung in a row on Execution dock.”

— James M. Barrie

248. “Hook always carried about his person a dreadful drug, blended by himself of all the death-dealing rings that had come into his possession. These he had boiled down into a yellow liquid quite unknown to science, which was probably the most virulent poison in existence. Five.”

— James M. Barrie

249. “He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth.”

— James M. Barrie

250. “Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.”

— James M. Barrie