P. L. Travers Quotes
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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.
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You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for - if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
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I make a point of writing, if only a little, every day, as a kind of discipline so that it is not a whim but a piece of work.
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I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.
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'Friend Monkey' is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite - the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went.
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You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.
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I never wrote my books especially for children.
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Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.
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For me, there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.
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I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.
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My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.
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I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
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We'll never forget you, Mary Poppins!
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I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
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A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
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My father died when I was 7. I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me.
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Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
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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.
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Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small.
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The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.
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The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bee knows, the wisdom that sustains our passing life - however much we deny or ignore it - that for ever remains.
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Could it be ... that the hero is one who is willing to set out, take the first step, shoulder something? Perhaps the hero is one who puts his foot upon a path not knowing what he may expect from life but in some way feeling in his bones that life expects something of him.
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What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?
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The silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loth to rob me of my last dear concealment.