“Remember that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again. There’s such a tremendous truth in that.”
The Paris Review interview (1982)
Context: She doesn’t hold back anything from them. When they beg her not to depart, she reminds them that nothing lasts forever. She’s as truthful as the nursery rhymes. Remember that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again. There’s such a tremendous truth in that. It goes into children in some part of them that they don’t know, and indeed perhaps we don’t know. But eventually they realize — and that’s the great truth.
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P. L. Travers 57
Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist 1899–1996Related quotes

Justifying million-dollar pay hike for Singapore ministers (Straits Times, 5 April 2007)
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The Great Wall of China.
Song lyrics, River of Dreams (1993)

On tweaking the one-man one-vote system after losing 2 seats to non-PAP Candidates, The Straits Times, 24 December 1984 http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=straitstimes19841224-1.2.2
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2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)
Source: The Storyteller's Daughter: A Retelling of the Arabian Nights
“I make that four horses and ten men just to get rid of one old woman. What did youto the King?”
Source: Howl's Moving Castle

“Oh, when shall English men
With such acts fill a pen,
Or England breed again
Such a King Harry?”
Source: To the Cambro-Britons and Their Harp, his Ballad of Agincourt (1627), Lines 117-120.

“These wretched kings,
Of whom all men speak ill, have oft some good in them.”
Ces malheureux rois,
Dont on dit tant de mal, ont du bon quelquefois.
Le Meunier de Sans-Souci. (Ed. 1818, Vol. III., p. 205).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 26.