"There are fairies at the bottom of our garden! It's not so very, very far away; You pass the gardener's shed and you just keep straight ahead— I do so hope they've really come to stay.[…]The King is very proud and very handsome, The Queen—now can you guess who that could be (She's a little girl all day, but at night she steals away)? Well—it's ME!"

"Faeries lead us astray to show us the way."

"This is not the considered dogma of schoolmen or of sages in council, but the whirring utterance of a poet, and it is with some such answer that we must affirm our belief in the fairy world. For this belief […] is so inconsiderable that it will never harden into a creed; so tiny and humble a thing that the wise of this world have never tried to preserve it as a talisman or to use it as an artificial symbol of contention. So that it has been left from the beginning to grow free like the daisies, and children from the morning of time have woven it into happy coronals and into flower-chains."

"Bright Eyes, Light Eyes! Daughter of a Fay! I had not been a married wife a twelvemonth and a day, I had not nursed my little one a month upon my knee, When down among the blue bell banks rose elfins three times three: They griped me by the raven hair, I could not cry for fear, They put a hempen rope around my waist and dragged me here; They made me sit and give thee suck as mortal mothers can, Bright Eyes, Light Eyes! strange and weak and wan!"

"FAIRY, n. A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are now believed by naturalists to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing through a park after dining with the lord of the manor. The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was incoherent."

"Whenever a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there's a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead."

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies."

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

"Do you believe in fairies? If you believe clap your hands."

"When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks."

"It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing known for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children."

"Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together, Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather!"

"Science seeks to explain everything—but maybe we don't want everything explained. We don't want all the magic to go out of life. We want to remain connected to the secret parts of our inner beings, to the ancient mysteries, and to the most distant outposts of the universe. We want to believe. And as long as we do, the fairies will remain."