"...Albert-next-door doesn't care for reading, and he has not read nearly so many books as we have, so he is very foolish and ignorant, but it cannot be helped... Besides, it is wrong to be angry with people for not being so clever as you are yourself."
— Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers)

""Don't you think it's rather nice to think that we're in a book that God's writing? If I were writing a book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right--in the way that's best for us."
"Do you really believe that, Mother?" Peter asked quietly.
"Yes," she said, "I do believe it--almost always--except when I'm so sad that I can't believe anything. But even when I don't believe it, I know it's true--and I try to believe it.'"
— Edith Nesbit

"This is why I shall not tell you in this story about all the days when nothing happened. You will not catch me saying, 'thus the sad days passed slowly by'--or 'the years rolled on their weary course'--or 'time went on'--because it is silly; of course time goes on--whether you say so or not. So I shall just tell you the nice, interesting parts--and in between you will understand that we had our meals and got up and went to bed, and dull things like that."
— Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Complete and Unabridged)

"'There are a thousand spears in my back,' said a little sharp voice, 'and they are all devoted to the Princess and to her alone.'"
— Edith Nesbit (The Enchanted Castle)

"Time is but a mode of thought"
— Edith Nesbit

"It is all very wonderful and mysterious, as all life is apt to be if you go a little below the crust, and are not content just to read newspapers and go by the Tube Railway, and buy your clothes ready-made, and think nothing can be true unless it is uninteresting."
— Edith Nesbit (The House of Arden)

"Then suddenly Jack was a changed boy. Something wonderful had happened to him, and it had made him different. It sometimes happened to people that they see or hear something quite wonderful and then they are never altogether the same again."
— Edith Nesbit (The Old Nursery Tales)

"There are brown eyes in the world, after all, as well as blue, and one pair of brown that meant heaven to me as the blue had never done"
— Edith Nesbit

"Grown-up people find it difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun as it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse. Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy."
— Edith Nesbit

"When you are young so many things are difficult to believe, and yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true--such things, for instance, as that the earth goes round the sun, and that it is not flat but round. But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all. Yet they are so easy to believe, especially when you see them happening."
— Edith Nesbit