P. L. Travers Quotations

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

'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.

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 .

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.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.

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.

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.

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.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

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

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.

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.

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

My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.

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

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.

Trouble trouble and it will trouble you.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I hate being good. -Mary Poppins

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

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.

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.

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.

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.

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.

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