Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes

“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

“Everything's a story - You are a story -I am a story.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“People never like me and I never like people," she thought. "And I never can talk as the Crawford children could. They were always talking and laughing and making noises.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“To speak robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“You can lose a friend in springtime easier than any other season if you're too curious.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“If nature has made you 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.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“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

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

“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

“Magic is in her just as it is in Dickon," said Colin. "It makes her think of ways to do things - nice things.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“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. I scarcely ever do.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Whatever comes cannot alter one thing.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“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

“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

“There was something friendly about Sara, and people always felt it.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Thoughts-just mere thoughts-are as powerful as electric batteries-as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“The strong and strange thing-that which moves on its way as do birth and death, and the rising and setting of the sun-had begun to move in them. It was no new and rare thing, but an ancient and common one-as common and ancient as death and birth themselves; and part of the law as they are. As it comes to royal persons to whom one makes obeisance at their mere passing by, as it comes to scullery maids in royal kitchens, and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to ladies-in-waiting and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two who had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides of the earth, and each started at the touch of it, and withdrew a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“The mere fact that Lottie had come and gone away again made things seem a little worse-just as perhaps prisoners feel a little more desolate after visitors come and go, leaving them behind.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“The tea was so delicious that it was not necessary to pretend it was anything but tea.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Sara!" she cried, aghast. "Mamma Sara!" She was aghast because the attic was so bare and ugly and seemed so far away from all the world. Her short legs had seemed to have been mounting hundreds of stairs.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth,”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“I don't know what it is to be hungry,”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked-a house on the edge of a moor-whatsoever a moor was-sounded dreary. A man with a crooked back who shut himself up also! She stared out of the window with her lips pinched together, and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun to pour down in gray

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“... Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latch-key in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any other century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they see it can be done- then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of these 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.
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
1911”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“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

“The sun is shining - the sun is shining. That is the Magic. The flower 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. In every one of us.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“It was so new and big and wonderful and such a heavenly color.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Mountains & low hills would enclose us, & gardens & woods & green spaces would surround us - And each pretty house & its garden would hide itself in its very own corner - And the beloved & understanding people would stroll in & out just when they chose & read to each other under trees on lawns & tell stories on broad porches while the mountains & the clouds & the birds & the flowers would look & listen & delight & always understand what everybody meant because they would all belong.
-from Frances Hodgson Burnett: The unexpected life of the author of the Secret Garden”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“As the plans of march made by great generals in”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Victorian and touchingly respectable. "I have been crying," confessed Lady Agatha. "I was afraid so, Lady Agatha," said Emily.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“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

Tom's Cabin, and she spent many hours acting out

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Color of gold. I have short black hair and green eyes;”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Secret garden that morning, and in the midst of”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

Innocent little villages full of homes torn and trampled under foot and burned!" the Duchess almost cried out. "And worse things than that-worse things!

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“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

That he should actually let her

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.”

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

You either build up or you tear down. You either keep in the light where you can see, or you stand in the dark and fight everything that comes near you, because you can't see and you think it's an enemy.

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

— Frances Hodgson Burnett