Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes

A Little Princess; Sara uses an imagined inner identity to preserve dignity during poverty and mistreatment.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. 'The game' is the boys’ repeated training exercise in memory, recognition and recall.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Loristan encourages Marco to strengthen a sketching ability useful to the story’s secret mission.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Marco says this while explaining that his father had long been preparing him for responsibility within the fictional plot.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Marco is trapped during the fictional mission; the line describes literary courage and does not advise ignoring real-world danger.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The exercise involves repeatedly sketching faces connected with places for the novel’s secret mission.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The material being memorized is fictional mission information, while the quoted sentence simply describes the learning process.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Loristan is training Marco for a fictional diplomatic and political mission, so the advice belongs to that narrative setting.

The Lost Prince, Chapter XVIII, “Cities and Faces,” Project Gutenberg #384. The narrator describes “Another part” of the boys’ secret-game preparation as The Rat training his memory and bringing home nightly proofs by describing, reciting or roughly sketching what he had observed. It remains fictional training narrative, not an experimentally established memory-training prescription.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The material being memorized belongs to a fictional covert political mission, so the record focuses on the described study process rather than the mission itself.

The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The narration refers to Marco’s long-running memory game, which later becomes useful inside the novel’s fictional secret mission.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXIII, “Magic.” Colin recalls that when he first tried to stand, Mary repeated “You can do it! You can do it!” The represented record is therefore tied to Colin’s recollection of Mary’s encouragement, not presented as general rehabilitation or medical advice.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXIII, “Magic.” Immediately after recalling Mary’s encouragement, Colin says that he had to try himself at the same time. The line keeps effort inside the novel’s fictional experiment/Magic rhetoric and is not clinical guidance.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXIII, “Magic.” Colin continues the chant with “Being alive is the Magic—being strong is the Magic.” This remains fictional child speech inside the novel’s recovery narrative and is not evidence that belief or positive thinking cures illness.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXVII, “In the Garden.” The unattributed embedded couplet “Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow” follows the narrator’s claim that two contrary thoughts cannot occupy one place. It is a literary gardening metaphor and must not be presented as scientific or mental-health evidence.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter X, “Dickon.” Mary tells Dickon that this is a secret garden and that she is the only person who wants it to be alive. The sentence belongs to Mary Lennox’s fictional discovery/care plot rather than to Burnett speaking autobiographically.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXIII, “Magic.” Colin’s chant says that the flowers are growing and the roots are stirring, treating visible spring growth as part of the children’s imaginative “Magic” framework. The novel’s Magic language is literary and is not medical evidence.

The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXVII, “In the Garden.” This collection keeps a shortened opening excerpt of the narrator’s longer sentence: strange possibilities move from disbelief to hope, then to demonstrated possibility and eventual accomplishment. It remains narrator commentary inside the novel rather than a scientific law of progress.