Quotes I liked in “A Little Princess” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (that I forgot to tweet):

“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.”

“She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn’t read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books—great, big, fat ones—

French and German as well as English—history and biography and poets, all all sort of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.”

“Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?”
“No,” she answered. “I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.”

“It makes you thankful when you are liked. Yes. We will be friends.”

“Things happen to people by accident,” she used to say. “A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice—

and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good tempered? I don’t know”—looking quite serious—

“How I shall ever find out wether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

“A new idea will stop a crying child when nothing else will.”

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

“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.”

“Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.”

“I—I can’t help making up things. If I didn’t, I don’t believe I could live.”

“Oh, Sara!” She whispered joyfully. “It is like a story!”
“It is a story,” said Sara. “Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

“When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word—just to look at them and think. When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not—

and they say stupid things they wish they hadn’t said afterward. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in—that’s stronger. It’s a good thing to not answer your enemies.”

“Perhaps you can feel if you can’t hear,” was her fancy. “Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls. Perhaps you feel a little warm and comforted, and don’t know why, when I am standing here in the cold and hoping you will get well and—

happy again.”

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

“And lies—well, you see, they are not only wicked—they are vulgar. Sometimes”—reflectively—“I’ve thought perhaps I might do something wicked—I might suddenly fly into rage and kill miss Minchin, you know, when she was ill-treating me— but I couldn’t be vulgar.”

-End of Thread-