Quotes Tagged "children-s-books"

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

All good children's stories are the same: young creature breaks rules, has incredible adventure, then returns home with the knowledge that aforementioned rules are there for a reason. Of course, the actual message to the careful reader is: break rules as often as you can, because who the hell doesn't want to have an adventure?

Long before we even lose our lives, we lose our souls. Tragic but true. Some carry on—willing to make the sacrifices, putting what is perceived as important before anything else. Some tread into the dark—wasting moments of grace, letting themselves suffer from their own decisions or the other’s domination. Some continue to love, give too much, and not leave even a little love for themselves.

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife. [The New York Times interview, 2000]

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world. [Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001]

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

The book she held had collapsed against her chest, planted like a shield between her tender heart and all that discouraged and despaired.

Wendell Minor: I believe that children's books are the last pond in the Serengeti. They are the only place we go to drink for inspiration. All of us can still go - and do....

You Are Beautiful, Beautiful You Are

Children are supposed to be free spirits and dream chasers, thinking of limitless opportunities. They are supposed to be filled with light that shines with happiness and joy that shouldn’t be dimmed or filled with darkness and fear.

Children should be living carefree lives and always smiling – laughing, filled with peace and harmony; not worrying about the troubles of what tomorrow may bring.

When in a little corner on a tiny blue dot, deep under the ocean, in a very special spot... an itty bitty thing woke up anew and came alive. I tell you, it's true!

She'd always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.

On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time.