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.
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.
Of course there must be lots of magic in the world but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen.
She would never tell him and he could stay in his room and never get any fresh air and die if he liked!
She could not be made rude and malicious by the rudeness and malice of those about her.
Do you understand everything birds say?” said Mary. Dickon’s grin spread until he seemed all wide, red, curving mouth, and he rubbed his rough head. “I think I do, and they think I do,” he said. “I’ve lived on th’ moor with ’em so long. I’ve watched ’em break shell an’ come out an’ fledge an’ learn to fly an’ begin to sing, till I think I’m one of ’em. Sometimes I think p’raps I’m a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a beetle, an’ I don’t know it.
I know what it is to be hungry, and it is very hard when one cannot even pretend it away. -Sara.
The woeful fright in the coal-smutted face made her suddenly so sorry that she could scarcely bear it. One of her queer thoughts rushed into her mind. She put her hand against Becky’s cheek. “Why,” she said, “we are just the same – I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!
Mrs. Craven was a very lovely young lady,” he had gone on rather hesitatingly. “An’ mother she thinks maybe she’s about Misselthwaite many a time lookin’ after Mester Colin, same as all mothers do when they’re took out o’ th’ world. They have to come back, tha’ sees. Happen she’s been in the garden an’ happen it was her set us to work, an’ told us to bring him here.” Mary.
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.
That’s almost like telling lies,” she said. “And lies – well, you see, they are not only wicked – they’re vulgar.
She had never felt sorry for herself; she had only felt tired and cross, because she disliked people and things so much.
Give her books, and she would devour them and end by knowing them by heart.
The very fact that she never made an impudent answer seemed to Miss Minchin a kind of impudence in itself.
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.
Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young. They’re still princesses.
The robin was tremendously busy. He was very much pleased to see gardening begun on his own estate. He had often wondered at Ben Weatherstaff. Where gardening is done all sorts of delightful things to eat are turned up with the soil. Now here was this new kind of creature who was not half Ben’s size and yet had had the sense to come into his garden and begin at once.
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.
The mere fact of her sufferings and adventures made her a priceless possession.
The magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man. I am going to make the scientific experiment of trying to get some and put it in myself and make it push and draw me and make me strong. I don’t know how to do it, but I think that if you keep thinking about it and calling it perhaps it will come.