P. L. Travers Quotes

I assure you I haven’t been so surprised since Christopher Columbus discovered America — truly I haven’t!

Trouble trouble and it will trouble you!

Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn’t know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself.

Nothing is certain in this world.

The lambs in their arms were as smooth as mushrooms, the flock at their heels unruffled. And amid all that froth of fleece, white and metrical as soap-suds, there was no sign of a black lamb.
What more could one ask, at a children’s Christmas Eve service? Yet I found that I did indeed want more, especially for the children’s sake — faces trodden by crows’-feet, signs of the ferment, one might almost say chaos, that this unprecedented event brought once and ever brings; something of life, even in carven faces, someone out of breath with running, someone stricken with joy.
And I dearly wanted a black lamb. For, without him, where are the ninety and nine? Flocks, like families, have need of their black sheep — he carries their sorrow for them. He is the other side of their whiteness. Does nobody understand, I wondered, that a crib without a black lamb is an incomplete statement?

Strawberry ice,” he said ecstatically. “More, more, more!

me since I couldn’t come down to you – eh?” And then

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.

the Match-Man had two professions. He not only sold matches like any ordinary match-man, but he drew pavement pictures as well. He did these things turn-about according to the weather. If it was wet, he sold matches because the rain would have washed away his pictures if he had painted them. If it was fine, he was on his knees all day, making pictures in coloured chalks on the side-walks, and doing them so quickly that often you would find he had painted up one side of a street and down the other almost before you’d had time to come round the corner. On this particular day, which was fine but cold, he was painting.

Thank you, ma’am,” said Mary Poppins with icy politeness. “But I bring the children up in my own way and take advice from nobody,

"I thought, Sir," Jane said to the King Cobra, "that lions and birds, and tigers and little animals are natural enemies."

"You are right. But not on the Birthday," said the King Cobra. "Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small. Even I can meet a Goose without any thought2 of dinner."

Robertson Ay sat down on the perambulator this morning. He mistook it for an arm-chair. So it will have to be mended. Can you manage without it — and carry Annabel?” Mary Poppins opened her mouth and closed it again with a snap. “I,” she remarked tartly, “can manage anything — and more, if I choose.

Come on, you two! In you come, Let’s see you dive for a bit of orange peel you don’t want.” It was a bitter, angry voice, and looking down they saw that it came from a small black Seal who was leering at them from a moonlit pool of water.

What I want to know,” she said, “is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

Every bed has a right and a wrong side,” said Mary Poppins, primly. “Not mine — it’s next the wall.” “That makes no difference. It’s still a side,” scoffed Mary Poppins. “Well, is the wrong side the left side or is the wrong side the right side? Because I got out on the right side, so how can it be wrong?