P. L. Travers Quotes

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.

Don't you know that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?

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

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.

Children's books are looked on as a sideline of literature. A special smile. They are usually thought to be associated with women. I was determined not to have this label of sentimentality put on me so I signed by my intials, hoping people wouldn't bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo.

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.

More and more I’ve become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown.

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.

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.

Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.

Tea is balm for the soul, don't you agree?

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.

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.

I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

Trouble trouble and it will trouble you.

What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

Who are you?" she inquired, as the cat passed by. I'm the cat that looked at a king," he replied. And I," she remarked with a toss of her head, "am the cow that jumped over the moon." Is that so?" said the cat. "Whatever for?" The cow stared. She had never been asked that question before. And suddenly it occured to her that there might something else to do than jumping over moons.

I hate being good. -Mary Poppins

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.

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

If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.

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.

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.

Stories are like birds flying, here and gone in a moment.

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.

It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. 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. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

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.

I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.