The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be any one’s little girl.

If she had been an affectionate child, who had been used to being loved, she would have broken her heart,

“He wouldn’t like me,” said Mary in her stiff, cold little way. “No one does.” Martha looked reflective again. “How does tha’ like thysel’?” she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know. Mary hesitated a moment and thought it over. “Not at all—really,” she answered. “But I never thought of that before.”

The mournful sound kept her awake because she felt mournful herself. If she had felt happy it would probably have lulled her to sleep.

“I want to forget it,” he said at last. “She makes me forget it. That is why I want her.”

You can lose a friend in springtime easier than any other season if you’re too curious.”

She knew nothing about the pitifulness of people who had been ill and nervous and who did not know that they could control their tempers and need not make other people ill and nervous, too.

ONE OF THE STRANGE things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.

“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”

Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.

IN EACH CENTURY SINCE the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered.

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

He did not understand at all himself—but he remembered this strange hour months afterward when he was at Misselthwaite again and he found out quite by accident that on this very day Colin had cried out as he went into the secret garden: “I am going to live forever and ever and ever!”