E. Nesbit Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by E. Nesbit with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
Image design Botanical Sage
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“It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing.”
Meaning & context
Nesbit’s narrator humorously observes how quickly the children normalize the impossible once a magical creature becomes part of their ordinary conversation.
Source details
Five Children and It, Chapter I, “Beautiful as the Day,” Project Gutenberg #17314. The narrator observes how quickly the children become accustomed to the astonishing after they begin conversing with the Psammead. This is playful children’s-fantasy narration rather than an empirical psychological claim about adaptation.
Source identified2
Image design Golden Hour
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“I think everyone in the world is friends if you can only get them to see you don’t want to be UN-friends.”
Meaning & context
Bobbie expresses a child’s hopeful belief that showing peaceful intent can sometimes turn strangers or antagonists into friends.
Source details
The Railway Children, Project Gutenberg #1874. Bobbie says this to her mother after discussing relationships with people they have met; Mother answers “Perhaps you’re right,” preserving the line as hopeful fictional dialogue rather than an unconditional social rule.
Source identified3
Image design Linen
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“But it is wonderful how soon you get used to things, even the things you want most.”
Meaning & context
The narrator notices that even long-desired changes can quickly lose their novelty once they become part of everyday life.
Source details
The Wouldbegoods, represented by Project Gutenberg #794. The observation appears in Nesbit’s comic children’s fiction and is filtered through the story’s child-centered narrative voice; it is literary observation rather than a measured claim about happiness.