Jane and Michael sat at the window watching for Mr. Banks to come home — P. L. Travers

"In an interview which appeared in The Paris Review in 1982 the interviewers asked Travers whether "Mary Poppins teaching — if one can call it that — resemble that of Christ in his parables". Travers replied: "My master, because Ive studied Zen for a long time, told me that every one (and all the stories werent written then) of the Mary Poppins stories is in essence a Zen story. And someone else, who is a bit of a , told me that every one of the stories is a moment of tremendous sexual passion, because it begins with such tension and then it is reconciled and resolved in a way that is gloriously sensual". The answer is clarified by the following question: "So people can read anything and everything into the stories?" "Indeed."

"Mary Poppins seems the epitome of the punishing governess, the bullying woman who has an apt saying for every occasion, and who subdues children as they were subdued in the Victorian age, when they were seen and not heard. ... She carefully hides her compassion. Almost sadistic at times, Mary is never really nasty but often very sharp. She is a controlling force, making order from disorder, making magic, and then never admitting magic took place. ... Mary Poppins threatens to leave at a point of time which only she controls. She tells her charges she will be with them until the wind changes or until her necklace breaks. She never tells them where she has come from, where she intends to go or who she really is. But she leaves many clues. Like Francis of Assisi, she is close to animals and birds, with whom she can talk. Like Jesus she helps the poor and weak. She understands the universe and seems to take part in its creation and renewal. She is known as the Great Expectation, the Oddity, the Misfit."

"For me there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I dont look for an answer, because I dont think there is one. Im very glad to be the bearer of a question."

"Mary Poppins is both a joy and a curse to me as a writer ... As a writer, you can feel awfully imprisoned, because people, having had so much of one thing, want you always to go on doing more of the same."

"If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads. He will push his helmet slightly to one side, scratch his head thoughtfully, and then he will point his huge white-gloved finger and say: "First to your right, second to your left, sharp right again, and youre there. Good-morning." And sure enough, if you follow his directions exactly, you will be there — right in the middle of Cherry-Tree Lane, where the houses run down one side and the Park runs down the other and the cherry-trees go dancing right down the middle. If you are looking for Number Seventeen — and it is more than likely that you will be, for this book is all about that particular house — you will very soon find it."

"On September 6, 1995 La Stampa, Turins daily newspaper, titled at full page "Is Mary Poppins really Satan?". Many readers were, understandably, surprised but no reader was more astonished than the undersigned. In fact I learned from the article that I had accused Mary Poppins to have "clear links with the esoteric and satanic thought". I was credited for having discovered that "under the gentle mask of the extraordinary nanny a dangerous creature was hidden, with features no less than satanic". The same journalist, appropriately, interviewed an exorcist who complained that "Introvigne normally minimizes the presence of Satan in our life" (a reference to my book on Satanism, where I argue that the number of real Satanists is minimum compared to the number of those who promote Satanism scares). But this, for the exorcist, amounted to still more convincing evidence that Mary Poppins was really satanic: "If someone like Massimo Introvigne has written such a thing, this could only mean that the danger is really there". The problem was, however, that I had never written such a thing."

"Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation."

"The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!"

"All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair — The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing — And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."

"Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former."