Mary Norton > Quotes

“Mrs. May looked back at her. "Kate," she said after a moment, "stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It's just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them.”
― Mary Norton

“Misfortunes make us wise”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“Keep your warm hearts, your gentleness, and your courage. These will do just as well as magic.”
― Mary Norton, Bedknob and Broomstick

“Arrietty used to make her 'e's' like little half-moons with a stroke in the middle-"
"Well?" said Kate
Mrs. May laughed and took up her work again. "My brother did too," she said.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“Oh no-"she began.It shocked her to be right. Parent's were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arriety knew and enjoy saying it- knowing always they were safe and wrong.”
― Mary Norton

“She learned a lot and some of the things she learned were hard to accept. She was made to realize once and for all that this earth on which they lived turning about in space did not revolve, as she had believed, for the sake of little people. “Nor for big people either,” she reminded the boy when she saw his secret smile.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“The child is right," she announced firmly.
Arrietty's eyes grew big. "Oh, no-" she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing always they were safe and wrong.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“...Borrower's don't steal."
"Except from human beings," said the boy.
Arrietty burst out laughing; she laughed so much that she had to hide her face in the primrose. "Oh dear," she gasped with tears in her eyes, "you are funny!" She stared upward at his puzzled face. "Human beans are for Borrowers - like bread's for butter!”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“And what if it were only a story?” said Mrs. May quickly, “so long as it was a good story? Keep your sense of wonder, child, and don’t be so literal. Anything we haven’t experienced for ourselves sounds like a story. All we can ever do is sift the evidence.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“I don't think human beans are all that bad-"
"They're bad and they're good," said Pod; "they're honest and they're artful- it's just as it takes them at the moment".”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“An inn, of course, was a place you came to at night (not at three o'clock in the afternoon), preferably a rainy night—wind, too, if it could be managed; and it should be situated on a moor (“bleak,” Kate knew, was the adjective here). And there should be scullions; mine host should be gravy-stained and broad in the beam with a tousled apron pulled across his stomach; and there should be a tall, dark stranger—the one who speaks to nobody—warming thin hands before the fire. And the fire should be a fire—crackling and blazing, laid with an impossible size log and roaring its great heart out up the chimney. And there should be some sort of cauldron, Kate felt, somewhere about—and, perhaps, a couple of mastiffs thrown in for good measure.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“would flower; and where birds came—and pecked”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“As people, other people, living in a house who . . . borrow things?"
Mrs. May laid down her work. "What do you think?" she asked.
"I don't know," Kate said, pulling hard at her shoe button. "There can't be. And yet"-she raised her head-"and yet sometimes I think there must be."
"Why do you think there must be?" asked Mrs. May.
"Because of all the things that disappear. Safety pins, for instance. Factories go on making safety pins, and every day people go on buying safety pins and yet, somehow, there never is a safety pin just when you want one. Where are they all? Now, at this minute? Where do they go to? Take needles," she went on. "All the needles my mother ever bought-there must be hundreds-can't just be lying about this house."
"Not lying about the house, no," agreed Mrs. May.
"And all the other things we keep on buying. Again and again and again. Like pencils and match boxes and sealing-wax and hairpins and drawing pins and thimbles-”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“¡Que mundo! Kilómetros y kilómetros, cosas y más cosas, un cúmulo de riquezas inimaginables..., ¡y ella podía haberse quedado sin conocerlo!”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers 2-in-1

“It's so awful and sad,” she once admitted to Tom Goodenough, “to belong to a race that no sane person believes in.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“Human beans are for Borrowers—like bread’s for butter!”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“In this life,” he went on, “you got to see what is, as you might say, and then face up to what you wish there wasn’t.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“The Past is Experience, Thats All You Got to Learn From.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“Oh," he said again and picked up two petals of cherry blossom which he folded together like a sandwich and ate slowly. "Supposing," he said, staring past her at the wall of the house, "you saw a little man, about as tall as a pencil, with a blue patch in his trousers, halfway up a window curtain, carrying a doll's tea cup-would you say it was a fairy?"
"No," said Arrietty, "I'd say it was my father."
"Oh," said the boy, thinking this out, "does your father have a blue patch on his trousers?"
"Not on his best trousers. He does on his borrowing ones."
'Oh," said the boy again. He seemed to find it a safe sound, as lawyers do. "Are there many people like you?"
"No," said Arrietty. "None. We're all different."
"I mean as small as you?"
Arrietty laughed. "Oh, don't be silly!" she said. "Surely you don't think there are many people in the world your size?"
"There are more my size than yours," he retorted.
"Honestly-" began Arrietty helplessly and laughed again. "Do you really think-I mean, whatever sort of a world would it be? Those great chairs . . . I've seen them. Fancy if you had to make chairs that size for everyone? And the stuff for their clothes . . . miles and miles of it . . . tents of it ... and the sewing! And their great houses, reaching up so you can hardly see the ceilings . . . their great beds ... the food they eat ... great, smoking mountains of it, huge bogs of stew and soup and stuff."
"Don't you eat soup?" asked the boy.
"Of course we do," laughed Arrietty. "My father had an uncle who had a little boat which he rowed round in the stock-pot picking up flotsam and jetsam. He did bottom-fishing too for bits of marrow until the cook got suspicious through finding bent pins in the soup. Once he was nearly shipwrecked on a chunk of submerged shinbone. He lost his oars and the boat sprang a leak but he flung a line over the pot handle and pulled himself alongside the rim. But all that stock-fathoms of it! And the size of the stockpot! I mean, there wouldn't be enough stuff in the world to go round after a bit! That's why my father says it's a good thing they're dying out . . . just a few, my father says, that's all we need-to keep us. Otherwise, he says, the whole thing gets"-Arrietty hesitated, trying to remember the word-"exaggerated, he says-"
"What do you mean," asked the boy, " 'to keep us'?”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“Un último impulso, y su cabeza y sus hombros estuvieron fuera del seto; el sol caliente le cayó sobre el cabello y, deslumbrada por el resplandor, entornó los ojos para mirar en derredor.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers 2-in-1

“Middle Ages”
― Mary Norton, Bed-Knob and Broomstick

“joyous”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Aloft: Plus the short tale Poor Stainless

“head”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Collection: Complete Editions of All 5 Books in 1 Volume: A Classic Fantasy Adventure About a Tiny World for Children

“Here she was on the other side of the grating—here she was at last, on the outside—looking in!”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“Stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It's just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“Homily would renew it at intervals when it became available upstairs, but since Aunt Sophy”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers 2-in-1

“The Fine Old Pale Madeira,”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“Can you read?" the boy said at last.
"Of course," said Arrietty. "Can't you?"
"No," he stammered. "I mean--yes. I mean I've just come from India."
"What's that got to do with it?" asked Arrietty.
"Well, if you're born in India, you're bilingual. And if you're bilingual, you can't read. Not so well."
Arrietty stared up at him: what a monster, she thought, dark against the sky.
"Do you grow out of it?" she asked.
He moved a little and she felt the cold flick of his shadow.
"Oh yes," head said, "it wears off. My sisters were bilingual; now they aren't a bit. They could read any of those books upstairs in the schoolroom."
"So could I," said Arrietty quickly, "if someone could hold them, and turn the pages. I'm not a bit bilingual. I can read anything.”
― Mary Norton, Borrowers

“Oh, I know Papa is a wonderful borrower. I know we’ve managed to stay when all the others have gone. But what has it done for us, in the end? I don’t think it’s so clever to live on alone, for ever and ever, in a great, big, half-empty house; under the floor, with no one to talk to, no one to play with, nothing to see but dust and passages, no light but candlelight and firelight and what comes through the cracks.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers

“Better to live well than to live long.”
― Mary Norton, Bedknob and Broomstick