“Then Mrs. Tiggy-winkle made tea – a cup for herself and a cup for Lucie. They sat before the fire on a bench and looked sideways at one another.”

All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife.

Sunday, January 27, 1884. — There was another story in the paper a week or so since.

The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

The shorter and the plainer the better.

We cannot stay home all our lives, we must present ourselves to the world and we must look upon it as an adventure.

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child.

Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: “One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.

I hold an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life.

Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.

I think prejudice and tradition count for three-quarters in matters of religion.

What we call the highest and the lowest in nature are both equally perfect. A willow bush is as beautiful as the human form divine.

One day puss did not take his place punctually, but presently appeared with two mice, one of which it placed on its master’s plate, the other on its own.

Peter lost one of his shoes among the cabbages, and the other shoe amongst the potatoes.

I have just made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself.

I think the pearls – one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl – really show a kind of [society] condition.

If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still.

Another one is Eric Clapton. Another one is Phil Collins. Eminem, Kanye West I like all those people.

There are still many great surviving talents: Stevie Winwood. Another great talent is Stevie Wonder.

It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

That vie with one another (“qui rivalisent à l’envi,” Fr.), by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder (“engins meurtriers”, Fr).

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.