Quotes · verified word for word in the text
A Little Princess quotes
12 quotes from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #37332 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.
— Spoken by a character · XI. RAM DASS
If Nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that--warm things, kind things, sweet things,--help and comfort and laughter,--and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.
Everything's a story. You are a story--I am a story.
— Sara · IX. MELCHISEDEC
How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.
"Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one."
— Spoken by a character · VI. THE DIAMOND-MINES
"I know you by heart. You are inside my heart."
— Spoken by a character · I. SARA
What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.
— Spoken by a character · XIII. ONE OF THE POPULACE
When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger.
— Sara · X. THE INDIAN GENTLEMAN
Some very odd things happen in this world sometimes.
Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.
"Somehow, something always happens," she cried, "just before things get to the very worst. It is as if the Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worst thing never quite comes."
— Spoken by a character · XV. THE MAGIC
"She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of, and what you do."
— Spoken by a character · VI. THE DIAMOND-MINES