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.

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.

Folks who make such a fuss about their rights turn them into wrongs sometimes. -- (from Behind the White Brick)

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

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it 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.

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if 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, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.