Top 69 P L Travers Quotes
#1. Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.
P.L. Travers
#2. Robertson Ay was sitting in the garden busily doing nothing.
P.L. Travers
#3. Stories are like birds flying, here and gone in a moment.
P.L. Travers
#4. Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty.
P.L. Travers
#5. 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.
P.L. Travers
#7. 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.
P.L. Travers
#8. 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.
P.L. Travers
#10. 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.
P.L. Travers
#11. Carpet," said Mary Poppins, putting her key in the lock.
P.L. Travers
#12. 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.
P.L. Travers
#13. He could smell her crackling white apron and the faint flavour of toast that always hung about her so deliciously.
P.L. Travers
#14. But at the very moment she was thinking these thoughts, adventure, as she afterwards told my Mother, was stalking her.
P.L. Travers
#15. Don't you know that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?
P.L. Travers
#16. Child and serpent, star and stone - all one.
P.L. Travers
#17. And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.
P.L. Travers
#18. She sounds like you, Mary Poppins,' said Michael. 'So terribly pleased with herself!
P.L. Travers
#19. Oh, go away! You're in my eyes," said John in a loud voice.
"Sorry!" said the sunlight. "I must move from East to West in a day. Sorry! Shut your eyes and you won't see me.
P.L. Travers
#20. I never wrote my books especially for children.
P.L. Travers
#21. All right, indeed! That was hardly the word. All right, in her blue jacket with the silver buttons! All right with her gold locket round her neck! All right with the parrot-headed umbrella under her arm!
P.L. Travers
#22. Mary Poppins," he cried, "you'll never leave us, will you?
P.L. Travers
#23. Michael, "I never expected the wish to come true."
The Trout, "Great Oceans! Why bother to wish it, then? I call that simply a waste of time.
P.L. Travers
#24. The Red Cow was very respectable, she always behaved like a perfect lady and she knew What was What.
P.L. Travers
#25. You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.
P.L. Travers
#26. I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
P.L. Travers
#27. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was.
P.L. Travers
#28. What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?
P.L. Travers
#29. 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.
P.L. Travers
#30. Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.
P.L. Travers
#31. A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
P.L. Travers
#32. 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.
P.L. Travers
#33. We're on the brink of an Adventure. Don't spoil it by asking questions!
P.L. Travers
#34. 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.
P.L. Travers
#35. 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.
P.L. Travers
#36. A very excellent and worthy person, thoroughly reliable in every particular.
P.L. Travers
#37. Mary Poppins never told anybody anything. . . .
P.L. Travers
#38. 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.
P.L. Travers
#40. And what's more, he'll go and live with his friend unless his friend is allowed to come in and live with him ... His friend must have a silk cushion just like his and sleep in your room too. Otherwise he will go and sleep in the coal-cellar with his friend
P.L. Travers
#41. So it was settled, and that was how the Banks family came to live at Number Seventeen, with Mrs. Brill to cook for them,
P.L. Travers
#42. I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.
P.L. Travers
#43. I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
P.L. Travers
#44. Next time you must stay for tea and we'll all sit together on a rock and sing a song to the moon
P.L. Travers
#46. Do you think that everything in the world is inside something else? My little Park inside the big one and the big one inside a larger one? Again and again? Away and away?" She waved her arm to take in the sky. "And to someone very far out there - do you think we would look like ants?" "Ants
P.L. Travers
#47. Mary Poppins is not a fairy-tale."
"She's even better!" said Alfred loyally. "She's a fairy-tale come true.
P.L. Travers
#48. 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.
P.L. Travers
#49. My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.
P.L. Travers
#50. Michael, you shall have some syrup of figs.
P.L. Travers
#51. More and more I've become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown.
P.L. Travers
#53. 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.
P.L. Travers
#54. 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.
P.L. Travers
#55. I'm not asleep," Jane reassured her. "I'm thinking about the story." "I heard every word," said Michael, yawning. The Park Keeper rocked, as if in a trance. "A Nex-plorer in disguise," he murmured, "sittin' in the midnight sun and climbin' the North Pole!" "Ouch!
P.L. Travers
#56. 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.
P.L. Travers
#57. She paused, as though she were remembering events that happened hundreds of years before that time.
P.L. Travers
#58. 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.
P.L. Travers
#59. I shouldn't wonder if you didn't wonder much too much!
P.L. Travers
#60. she wore so many brooches and necklaces and earrings that she jingled and jangled just like a brass band.
P.L. Travers
#61. Pooh, he's a ninkypoop!" "How do you know?" asked Jane, very interested. "I know because I heard Daddy call him one this morning!" said Michael, and he laughed at Andrew very rudely. "He is not a nincompoop," said Mary Poppins. "And that is that.
P.L. Travers
#62. What is real and what is not? Can you tell me or I you? Perhaps we shall never know more than this - that to think a thing is to make it true.
P.L. Travers
#64. If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.
P.L. Travers
#65. You can't expect two stars to drop in the same field in one lifetime
P.L. Travers
#66. Mary Poppins was very vain and liked to look her best. Indeed, she was quite sure that she never looked anything else.
P.L. Travers
#67. '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.
P.L. Travers
#69. 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.
P.L. Travers
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