becoming real Quotes

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“One of them was brown all over, but the other had strange markings under his fur, as though long ago he had been spotted, and the spots still showed through. And about his little soft nose and his round black eyes there was something familiar, so that the Boy thought to himself: ‘Why, he looks just like my old Bunny that was lost when I had scarlet fever!’ But he never knew that it really was his own Bunny, come back to look at the child who had first helped him to be Real.”

“Of what use was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this?”

″‘I am the nursery magic Fairy,’ she said. ‘I take care of all the playthings that the children have loved. When they are old and worn out and the children don’t need them any more, then I come and take them away with me and turn them into Real.‘”

″‘Wasn’t I Real before?’ asked the little Rabbit. ‘You were Real to the Boy,’ the Fairy said, ‘because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.‘”

″‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.‘”

″‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.‘”

“And he found that he actually had hind legs! Instead of dingy velveteen he had brown fur, soft and shiny, his ears twitched by themselves, and his whiskers were so long that they brushed the grass. He gave one leap and the joy of using those hind legs was so great that he went springing about the turf on them, jumping sideways and whirling round as the others did, and he grew so excited that when at last he did stop to look for the Fairy she had gone.”

“The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

“Pain or love or danger makes you real again...”

“The more she went on to forget love, the closer she went on to become it.”

“Man became man by living in the hands of the gods.”

“To-morrow I cease to be a puppet, and I become a boy like you and all the other boys.”

“Stella had lived white for half her life now, and maybe acting for that long ceased to be acting altogether. Maybe pretending to be white eventually made it so.”