P.L. Travers Quotes

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.

she wore so many brooches and necklaces and earrings that she jingled and jangled just like a brass band.

I hate being good.
-Mary Poppins

The Red Cow was very respectable, she always behaved like a perfect lady and she knew What was What.

Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.

Mary Poppins," he cried, "you'll never leave us, will you?

But at the very moment she was thinking these thoughts, adventure, as she afterwards told my Mother, was stalking her.

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.

Stories are like birds flying, here and gone in a moment.

I shouldn't wonder if you didn't wonder much too much!

This is your new nurse, Mary Poppins.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

More and more I've become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown.

My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.

Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.

Child and serpent, star and stone - all one.

Mary Poppins is not a fairy-tale."
"She's even better!" said Alfred loyally. "She's a fairy-tale come true.

I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

Mary Poppins never told anybody anything. . . .

I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

Robertson Ay was sitting in the garden busily doing nothing.

Michael, you shall have some syrup of figs.

Don't you know that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

We're on the brink of an Adventure. Don't spoil it by asking questions!

Trouble trouble and it will trouble you.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

So it was settled, and that was how the Banks family came to live at Number Seventeen, with Mrs. Brill to cook for them,

You can't expect two stars to drop in the same field in one lifetime

She sounds like you, Mary Poppins,' said Michael. 'So terribly pleased with herself!

Tea is balm for the soul, don't you agree?

What is real and what is not? Can you tell me or I you? Perhaps we shall never know more than this - that to think a thing is to make it true.

A very excellent and worthy person, thoroughly reliable in every particular.

If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.

Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty.

Sir Christopher Wren's Cathedral

I'm the Waiter, you know!

Michael, "I never expected the wish to come true."
The Trout, "Great Oceans! Why bother to wish it, then? I call that simply a waste of time.

Next time you must stay for tea and we'll all sit together on a rock and sing a song to the moon

She paused, as though she were remembering events that happened hundreds of years before that time.

He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was.

What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

Mary Poppins was very vain and liked to look her best. Indeed, she was quite sure that she never looked anything else.

Well, au revoir, one and all.

When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.

Carpet," said Mary Poppins, putting her key in the lock.

He could smell her crackling white apron and the faint flavour of toast that always hung about her so deliciously.

And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.