“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Borrowers
“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, quote from The Borrowers
“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, quote from 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, quote from The Borrowers
“Human beans are for Borrowers—like bread’s for butter!”
― Mary Norton, quote from 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, quote from The Borrowers
“would flower; and where birds came—and pecked”
― Mary Norton, quote from The Borrowers
Mary Norton
Born place: in Leighton Buzzard, The United Kingdom
Born date December 10, 1903
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“Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised, organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement of the live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know proud passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust.... And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable! These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets, at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing across the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some day, and soon, be gone.”
― Jack London, quote from John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs
“They headed back into the maze of gardens. The shrubberies seemed to crawl. Victoria ignored them, pushing past thorns and brambles and suspiciously roachlike leaves, concentrating not on them but on the pinching grip of Lawrence's fingers. Hmm, she thought. I suppose this is actually somewhat useful. She didn't so much mind holding his hand from that moment on.”
― Claire Legrand, quote from The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls
“Merry Patricia Wilding was sitting on a cobblestone wall, sketching three rutabagas and daydreaming about the unicorn.”
― Laura London, quote from The Windflower
“My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“Meet today’s problems with today’s strength. Don’t start tackling tomorrow’s problems until tomorrow. You do not have tomorrow’s strength yet. You simply have enough for today.”
― Max Lucado, quote from Traveling Light: Releasing the Burdens You Were Never Intended to Bear
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