Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.
Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.
Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.
Indeed, the more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.
All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.
You have a point,” said Fronto, “and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic.
But, alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging.
Don’t frown so, you’ll look old before your time.
At the end of their grim race, death might be the only prize.
Don’t pout that way, my child, you’ll give yourself a blister.
In an age that seems to be increasingly dehumanized, when people can be transformed into non-persons, and where a great deal of our adult art seems to diminish our lives rather than add to them, children’s literature insists on the values of humanity and humaneness.
A grower of turnups Or shaper of clay, a commot Farmer or a king-Every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.
There is an exuberance in good fantasy quite unlike the most exalted moments of realistic fiction. Both forms have similar goals; but realism walks where fantasy dances.
I think we should always remember that reading – the experience of a book – is a very private, very personal kind of thing. Sometimes the best response to such an experience is: silence.
When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated – with the social consequences we know all too well.
A lady doesn’t insist on having her own way. Then, next thing you know, it all works out somehow, without one’s even trying. I thought I’d never learn, though it’s really quite easy once you get the knack.
Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty, too.
It may be,” replied Coll, smiling, “we know least what we treasure most. But we will have more than enough to keep us busy when you come back, and you will learn, my boy, there is nothing like work to put the heart at rest.