P. L. Travers Quotes

1899–1996 Australia

Pamela Lyndon Travers (August 9 1899 – April 23 1996) was a British author, born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia, best known as the creator of the "Mary Poppins" series of stories.

Australia
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Authors
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Also known as: P L Travers, PL Travers, Pamela Travers, Travers, P. L.

Random P. L. Travers quote

45 quotes

Mary Poppins herself had flown away, but the gifts she had brought would remain for always..

Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943)

Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small.

Mary Poppins (1934)

I always thought dancing improper; but it can't be since I myself am dancing.

Mary Poppins (1934)

These men — Yeats, James Stephens, and the rest — had aristocratic minds. For them, the world was not fragmented. An idea did not suddenly grow … all alone and separate.

Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins (2007)

It is clear from Gurdjieff's writings that hypnotism, mesmerism and various arcane methods of expanding consciousness must have played a large part in the studies of the Seekers of Truth.

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

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

Mary Poppins (1934)

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.

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

Mary Poppins (1934)

Only the very meanest people refuse to give pennies and these are always visited by Extreme Bad Luck.

Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943)

The true fairytales … come straight out of myth; they are, as it were, minuscule reaffirmation of myths, or perhaps the myth made accessible to the local folky mind.

Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins (2007)

“Myth, Symbol, and Tradition” was the phrase I originally wrote at the top of the page, for editors like large, cloudy titles.

If you are looking for Number Seventeen — and it is more than likely that you will be, for this book is all about that particular house — you will very soon find it.

Mary Poppins (1934)

Remember that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again. There’s such a tremendous truth in that.

The Paris Review interview (1982)

The silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loth to rob me of my last dear concealment.

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.

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.

I’ve always been interested in the Mother Goddess.

The Paris Review interview (1982)

The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bee knows, the wisdom that sustains our passing life — however much we deny or ignore it — that for ever remains.

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

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: P. L. Travers (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.