P. L. Travers Quotes
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'Bird and beast and stone and star - we are all one, all one -' murmured the Hamadryad, softly folding his hood about him as he himself swayed between the children. 'Child and serpent, star and stone - all one.'
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It is only through the ordinary that the extraordinary can make itself perceived.
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Mary Poppins herself had flown away, but the gifts she had brought would remain for always..
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I read myths and fairy tales and books about them a great deal now, but I very seldom read novels. I find modern novels bore me. I can read Tolstoy and the Russians, but mostly I read comparative mythology and comparative religion. I need matter to carry with me.
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Children's books are looked on as a sideline of literature. A special smile. They are usually thought to be associated with women. I was determined not to have this label of sentimentality put on me so I signed by my intials, hoping people wouldn't bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo.
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The same substance composes us--the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star--we are all one, all moving to the same end.
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With the word creative we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light - by grace, one feels, rather than deserving, for it always is something given, free, unsought, unexpected.
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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.
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Perhaps we are born knowing the tales of our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first bear them is not of surprise but of recognition.
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I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.
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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.
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And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.