“Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”

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.

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.

So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.

You had me at fruit pies

Hugs aren’t like pieces of pie. Plenty of hugs to go around.

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.

The profoundly cynical premise of all religionists is that people are not capable of behaving decently toward one another unless they are lured with promises of pie in the sky and simultaneously terrorized by the threats of extreme nastiness in the eternal afterlife in hell.

I got a fan letter on the back of a prison menu. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, they get pie. It’s not so bad. They get pie on the weekends.’ I want to say blueberry and also a Boston cream pie. Not so bad.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

Souness critics must eat humble pie as he transforms Newcastle.