Quotes · verified word for word in the text
J. M. Barrie quotes
15 quotes from 3 of J. M. Barrie’s books on this site, book by book. Each quote is copied exactly from the book’s text in this site’s reader (the Project Gutenberg e-text named under each book) and links to its passage; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against that text. Quotes we could not find in a book we host are not listed.
Peter Pan
It was saying, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
All children, except one, grow up.
“Second to the right,” said Peter, “and then straight on till morning.”
— Peter · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
“You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
— Spoken by a character · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
“Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.”
— Spoken by a character · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,” Peter explained, “and they lift you up in the air.”
— Spoken by a character · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
“I don’t want ever to be a man,” he said with passion. “I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies.”
— Spoken by a character · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
Do you know,” Peter asked “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.
— Peter · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
— Spoken by a character · III. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!
Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.
The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens
Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?
It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing known for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.
The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.
The Admirable Crichton
Agatha, I’m not young enough to know everything.
— Ernest · I. AT LOAM HOUSE, MAYFAIR
No, my lady; his lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants’ hall.
— Crichton · I. AT LOAM HOUSE, MAYFAIR