A. A. Milne Quotes (1882-1956)

“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”

“Oh!" said Pooh again. "What is the North Pole?" "It's just a thing you discover," said Christopher Robin, not being quite sure himself.”

“Just because an animal is large, it doesn't mean he doesn't want kindness; however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo.”

“The Sun was still in bed, but there was a lightness in the sky over the Hundred Acre Wood which seemed to show that it was waking up and would soon be kicking off its clothes.”

“The Piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house blowing happily at a dandelion, and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime or never, and was trying to remember what it was, and hoping it wasn't anything nice...”

“Christopher Robin was sitting outside his door, putting on his Big Boots. As soon as he saw the Big Boots, Pooh knew that an Adventure was about to happen, and he brushed the honey off his nose with the back of his paw, and spruced himself up as well as he could, so as to look Ready for Anything.”

“It was a warm day and he had a long way to go. He hadn't gone more than half-way when a sort of funny feeling began to creep all over him. It began at the tip of his nose and trickled all through him and out at the soles of his feet. It was just as if somebody inside him were saying "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something".”

“...the wind had dropped, and the snow, tired of rushing around in circles trying to catch itself up, now fluttered gently down until it found a place on which to rest, and sometimes the place was Pooh's nose and sometimes it wasn't and in a little while Piglet was wearing a white muffler round his neck and feeling more snowy behind the ears than he had ever felt before.”

“...the sun had come back over the Forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much...”

“One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The elder man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. As I wrote once: It is a Household Book; a book which everybody in the household loves, and quotes continually; a book which is read aloud to every new guest and is regarded as the touchstone of his worth. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know. But it is you who are on trial.”

“A Kanga is Generally Regarded as One of the Fiercer Animals. I am not frightened of Fierce Animals in the ordinary way, but it is well known that, if One of the Fiercer Animals is Deprived of Its Young, it becomes as fierce as Two of the Fiercer Animals.”

“To contemporary historians Mr. Baldwin is the Good Man, the Idealist, the Honourable Gentleman. He has every qualification for the part. I am inclined to believe that he is the only politician in our time who has honestly put his party before himself and his country before his party...We forget neither Lord Balfour's white-hot idealism, nor Lord Oxford's passionate interest in the working man, nor Mr. Lloyd George's selfless indifference to power, when we say that under no other leader could England have come through the General Strike so well. He has proved to us convincingly that cleverness is not enough...We are so unused to hearing a politician called 'The Good' that for the moment we have nothing but bouquets to throw at our Mr. Baldwin. But this will not last. The time will come when we shall be looking round for other ammunition.”

“My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too.”

“To A. A. Milne belongs the honour of enshrining with urban romance the civilized and comfortable child of to-day. When we were Very Young marks an epoch as positively as any children's book has ever marked one. It is not extravagant to surmise that a distant posterity may find in that volume of children's verse a key with which to unlock the present more easily than with any contemporary novel, or poem, or play.”