Beatrix Potter Quotes

Today there are no fairy tales for us to believe in, and this is possibly a reason for the universal prevalence of mental crack-up. Yes, if we were childish in the past, I wish we could be children once again.

Having children has helped me become a better actor because they remind you to play make believe. It's the ease and naturalness of their beings. They just play and it's completely real for them at the time. As an actor, if we do it well, we make you believe.

To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.

Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children.

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

I don't believe in things like that - fairies or brownies or magic or anything. It's old-fashioned.' 'Well, we must be jolly old-fashioned then,' said Bessie. 'Because we not only believe in the Faraway Tree and love our funny friends there, but we go to see them too - and we visit the lands at the top of the Tree as well!

Fairy tales were important to me. Aren't they for any kid? My sister says I spent a good five years of my youth convinced I would grow up to be a princess.

My parents read me fairy tales every night and I used to believe I was a fairytale princess, like every young girl. I had all the Disney dressing-up costumes and would play every character.

When I was a child, I wanted to be... a fairy. I still do, really, except that now I've now graduated to wanting to be a pixie.

When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals - they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It's harder as an adult.

Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry.

It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific.

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?

Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

I would watch 'Wizard of Oz,' like every day, when I was two. I had a hard time understanding that I couldn't go into the film, because it felt so real to me.

I enjoyed being in movies when I was a boy. As a child you're not acting - you believe. Ah, if an adult could only act as a child does with that insane, playing-at-toy- soldiers concentration!

"We will wait," answered little Alice, taking Nettie's hand in hers, and looking up to the sky, "we will wait - ever constant and true - till the times have got so changed as that everything helps us out, and nothing makes us ridiculous, and the fairies have come back. We will wait - ever constant and true - till we are eighty, ninety, or one hundred. And then the fairies will send US children, and we will help them out, poor pretty little creatures, if they pretend ever so much."

Harry Potter's like Santa Clause: something you can't see but wish was real so badly that you end up believing in it.

If the land of make believe is inside your heart it will never leave.

It's fun to pretend you're a little kid, you get to use your imagination and live in a world that's not real.

Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?