Norton often describes the human world from Arrietty’s viewpoint, and the gigantic scale of everyday items becomes a running motif throughout the book. To Arrietty, a soup pot is a deep ocean, and a set of stairs is a series of sheer cliffs that must be scaled using a hatpin. While the magnitude of human-sized items is often emphasized simply to establish the relative size of the Borrowers, it also allows the reader to view the human world from an entirely different perspective, imagining just what it might be like to navigate a world in which the most basic items towered overhead and introduced seemingly impossible obstacles to overcome.

Conversely, the motif of size and scale is used in reference to the Borrower world to relay how differently the many common items in the human world would be regarded by a person only a few inches tall. Thus, a thimble becomes a useful stool, a coin becomes a plate, and a postage stamp becomes a piece of elaborate artwork worthy of being hung on the wall and admired as a hard-won item of decor.