The Little White Bird Quotes

“The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“What is afraid?' asked Peter longingly. He thought it must be some splendid thing. 'I do wish you would teach me how to be afraid, Maimie,' he said.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“Life and death, the child and the mother, are ever meeting as the one draws into harbour and the other sets sail. They exchange a bright "All's well" and pass on.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“It is glorious fun racing down the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead
young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is
no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back.
They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their
jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, "How is it with you, my
child?" but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they
whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to
see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath
the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little
vests he has. They love to do these things.

What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their
child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him,
and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to
room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate
souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that
go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are
invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know
of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to
pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face
appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then
vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were
opened in the night. The curtains of his bed were set fire to.
A step on the stair was loosened. The covering of an old well in
a corridor where he walked was cunningly removed. And when he
fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by his bedside,
and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that this
grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search?

All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty
as lost wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we
are not nearly so afraid of them as they are of us.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“I have seen him climbing a tree while she stood beneath him in unutterable anguish; she had to let him climb, for boys must be brave, but I am sure that, as she watched him, she fell from every branch.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindness linger there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“You expected too much of me’ I told him, and he bowed his head. ‘I don’t know where you brought your grand ideas of men and women from. I don’t want to know’ I added hastily. But I must have been a prettier word that this’ I said: ‘are you quite sure that you were wise in leaving it?”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“Oh, Maimie," he said rapturously, "do you know why I love you? It is because you are like a beautiful nest.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

“And in the end, you know, he flew away. Twice he came back from the window, wanting to kiss his mother, but he feared the delight of it might waken her, so at last he played her a lovely kiss on his pipe, and then he flew back to the Gardens”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

“Sitting on the rail at the foot of the bed, he played a beautiful lullaby to his mother on his pipe. He made it up himself out of the way she said "Peter," and he never stopped playing until she looked happy.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

“You ladies who are everything to your husbands, save a girl from the dream of youth, have you never known that double-chinned industrious man laugh suddenly in a reverie and start up, as if he fancied he were being hailed from far away?”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

“I seem to remember carrying him that evening to the window with uncommon tenderness (following the setting sun that was to take him away), and telling him with not unnatural bitterness that he had got to leave me because another child was in need of all his pretty things; and as the sun, his true father, lapt him in its dancing arms, he sent his love to a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never have a mother.

I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed on paper-galleon on the Round Pond; fain would I have had him chase one hoop a little way down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once, on a long summer-day, emerging at the other end as men and women with all the fun to pay for; and I think (thus fancy wantons with me in these desolate champers) he knew my longings, and said with a boy-like flush that the reason he never did these things was not that he was afraid, for he would have loved to do them all, but because he was not quite like other boys; and, so saying, he let go my finger and faded from before my eyes into another and olden ether; but I shall ever hold that had he been quite like the other boys there would have been none braver than my Timothy”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

“So fond of babes was this little mother that she had always room near her for one more”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird: Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

“You can be good in the Broad Walk all the time, but not at the Round Pond, and the reason is that you forget, and, when you remember, you are so wet that you may as well be wetter.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“It is idle to attempt to overtake a pretty young woman carrying pork chops. I was now determined to be done with her. First, however, to find out their abode, which was probably within easy distance of the shop. I even conceived them lured into taking their house by the advertisement, "Conveniently situation for the Pork Emporium.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“Surely a spirited old lady may be the prettiest sight in the world.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“She has been putting qualities into David, altering him, turning him forever on a lathe since the day she first knew him, and indeed long before, and all so deftly that he is still called a child of nature.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird