J.M. Barrie
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.
The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. He took up journalism, worked for a Nottingham newspaper, and contributed to various London journals before moving to London in 1885. His early works, Auld Licht Idylls (1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889), contain fictional sketches of Scottish life and are commonly seen as representative of the Kailyard school. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next 10 years Barrie continued writing novels, but gradually his interest turned toward the theatre.
In London he met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a "fairy play" about this ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and although he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited with popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon previously.
Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which continues to benefit from them.
“You won't forget me, Peter, will you, before spring-cleaning time comes?Of course Peter promised, and then he flew away. He took Mrs. Darling's kiss with him. The kiss that had been for no one else Peter took quite easily. Funny. But she seemd satisfied.”
“There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
“And so when Mrs. Darling went back to the night-nursery to see if her husband was asleep, all the beds were occupied. The children waited for her cry of joy, but it did not come. She saw them, but she did not believe they were there. You see, she saw them in their beds so often in her dreams that she thought this was just the dream hanging around her still.”
“She's awfully fond of Wendy,' he said to himself. He was angry with her now for not seeing why she could not have Wendy.The reason was so simple: 'I'm fond of her too. We can't both have her, lady.”
“Pan, who and what art thou?" he cried huskily."I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, "I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
“For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face."So, Pan," said Hook at last, "this is all your doing.""Ay, James Hook," came the stern answer, "it is all my doing.""Proud and insolent youth," said Hook, "prepare to meet thy doom.""Dark and sinister man," Peter answered, "have at thee.”
“Boy, why are you crying?”
“Build a house?" exclaimed John."For the Wendy," said Curly."For Wendy?" John said, aghast. "Why, she is only a girl!""That," explained Curly, "is why we are her servants.”
“children know such a lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”
“Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?"Nothing, precious," she said; "they are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard her children.”
“That fiend!" Mr. Darling would cry, and Nana's bark was the echo of it, but Mrs. Darling never upbraided Peter; there was something in the right-hand corner of her mouth that wanted her not to call Peter names.”
“On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.”
“All children, except one, grow up.”
“Wendy," Peter Pan continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, "Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.”
“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
“Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.”
“Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. ”
“If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.”
“Thus did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.”
“Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.”
“Yet if he upbraided her in his hurry, it was to repent bitterly his temper the next, and to feel its effects more than she, temper being a weapon that we hold by the blade.”
“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”