Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.

See All TOPICS Available:
See All AUTHORS Available:

Search by Topic:

  • topic cats
  • topic books
  • topic moon

Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.

Search by Last Name:

  • Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Quotes by Louisa May Alcott
  • Quotes by Chingling Soong

Find quotations by the AUTHOR´S LAST NAME
or alphabetically below.

Search by Keyword:

  • keyword fishing
  • keyword twilight
  • keyword Australie

P.L. Travers

  • Trouble trouble and it will trouble you.

  • Children's books are looked on as a sideline of literature. A special smile. They are usually thought to be associated with women. I was determined not to have this label of sentimentality put on me so I signed by my intials, hoping people wouldn't bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo.

    • P.L. Travers,
    • in Haskel Frankel, "A Rose for Mary Poppins," Saturday Review ()
  • ... I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.

    • P.L. Travers,
    • in Roy Newquist, Conversations ()
  • I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

    • P.L. Travers,
    • in Roy Newquist, Conversations ()
  • 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.

    • P.L. Travers,
    • in Anne Commrie, Something About the Author, vol 54 ()
  • 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, in fact, no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

    • P.L. Travers,
    • in Newsweek ()
  • I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.

    • P.L. Travers,
    • in George Plimpton, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 9th series ()

P.L. Travers, Australian writer

(1906 - 1996)

Full name: Pamela Lyndon Travers.