If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
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.
It is astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen.
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 thatβwarm things, kind things, sweet thingsβhelp and comfort and laughterβand sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.
The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.
My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.
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. 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 you in you may never get over it as long as you live.
Hang in there. It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen.
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.
They never sat up all night with Trouble, Peter Piper used to say. And I told him they were quite right. If you make a fuss over trouble and put it to bed and nurse it and give it beef tea and gruel, you can never get rid of it
Children's as good as 'rithmetic to set you findin' out things.
She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.
Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.
She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.
