When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too . . . she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.

If I go on talking and talking...and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don't forget, but you bear it better.

However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.

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

The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man.

The mug from the washstand was used as Becky's tea cup, and the tea was so delicious that it was not necessary to pretend that it was anything but tea.

And they both began to laugh over nothing as children will when they are happy together. And they laughed so that in the end they were making as much noise as if they had been two ordinary healthy natural ten-year-old creatures—instead of a hard, little, unloving girl and a sickly boy who believed that he was going to die.