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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

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P. L. Travers
Age: 96 †
Born: 1899
Born: August 9
Died: 1996
Died: April 23
Actor
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maryborough
Queensland
Australia
Pamela Lyndon Travers
Helen Lyndon Goff
Miss Travers
Children
Books
Bother
Kangaroos
Men
Written
Determined
Sidelines
People
Names
Smile
Sentimentality
Literature
Looked
Signed
Woman
Usually
Associated
Thought
Wouldn
Label
Women
Special
Hoping
Sideline
Book
Wonder
Labels
Kangaroo

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Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.
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You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.
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I hate being good. -Mary Poppins
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I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
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The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.
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Perhaps we are born knowing the tales of our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first bear them is not of surprise but of recognition.
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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.
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I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
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The same substance composes us--the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star--we are all one, all moving to the same end.
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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.
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Could it be ... that the hero is one who is willing to set out, take the first step, shoulder something? Perhaps the hero is one who puts his foot upon a path not knowing what he may expect from life but in some way feeling in his bones that life expects something of him.
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Tea is balm for the soul, don't you agree?
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What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?
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If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.
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A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
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