P. L. Travers Quotes

You said you were the King of the Castle – and you’re not, not by any means! But that’s the Dirty Rascal.

Mary Poppins walked down the garden path and opened the gate. Once outside in the Lane, she set off walking very quickly as if she were afraid the afternoon would run away from her if she didn’t keep up with it. At the corner she turned to the right and then to the left, nodded haughtily to the Policeman, who said it was a nice day, and by that time she felt that her Day Out had begun.

This was the only place in the Park that was never mown or weeded. Clover, daisies, buttercups, bluebells, grew as high as the children's waists. Nettles and dandelions flaunted their blossoms, for they knew very well that the Park Keeper would never have time to root them out. None of them observed the rules. They scattered their seeds across the lawns, hustled each other for the best places, and crowded together so closely that their stems were always in shadowy darkness.

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

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

A very old-fashioned idea, to my mind,” Jane and Michael heard the stern voice say. “Very old-fashioned. Quite out of date, as you might say.

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

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.

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

And when, at last, .... I stood in London with ten pounds in my hand - five of which I promptly lost - the ancestors dwelling in my blood who, all my life, had summoned me with insistent eldritch voices, murmured together, like contented cats.

You know C. S. Lewis, whom I greatly admire, said there’s no such thing as creative writing. I’ve always agreed with that and always refuse to teach it when given the opportunity. He said there is, in fact, only one Creator and we mix. That’s our function, to mix the elements He has given us. See how wonderfully anonymous that leaves us? You can’t say, “I did this; this gross matrix of flesh and blood and sinews and nerves did this.” What nonsense! I’m given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me. I’ve always loved the idea of the craftsman, the anonymous man. For instance, I’ve always wanted my books to be called the work of Anon, because Anon is my favorite literary character. If you look through an anthology of poems that go from the far past into the present time, you’ll see that all the poems signed “Anon” have a very specific flavor that is one flavor all the way through the centuries. I think, perhaps arrogantly, of myself as “Anon.” I would like to think that Mary Poppins and the other books could be called back to make that change. But I suppose it’s too late for that.

You don’t look too blooming,” he said to Mary Poppins. “But then, nobody does — — ” Mary Poppins tossed her head. “Speak for yourself,” she said crossly, and flounced to the door, pushing the perambulator so fiercely that it bumped into a bag of oysters.

I always thought dancing improper; but it can't be since I myself am dancing.

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.

Down below, just outside the front door, stood Mary Poppins, dressed in her coat and hat, with her carpet bag in one hand and her umbrella in the other.