Best Children's Literature Quotes & Sayings

It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh — A.A. Milne

The qualities that make for excellence in children's literature can be summed up in a single word: imagination. And imagination as it relates to the child is, to my mind, synonymous with fantasy. Contrary to most of the propaganda in books for the young, childhood is only partly a time of innocence. It is, in my opinion, a time of seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering. It's also possibly the best of all times. Imagination for the child is the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day ... It's through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. — Maurice Sendak

Nothing is part of everything. — Dejan Stojanovic

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students
and in good colleges, also the most successful
are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child. — Katherine Paterson

I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.
My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it. — Lloyd Alexander

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] — John Rogers

I really feel that we're not giving children enough credit for distinguishing what's right and what's wrong. I, for one, devoured fairy tales as a little girl. I certainly didn't believe that kissing frogs would lead me to a prince, or that eating a mysterious apple would poison me, or that with the magical "Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo" I would get a beautiful dress and a pumpkin carriage. I also don't believe that looking in a mirror and saying "Candyman, Candyman, Candyman" will make some awful serial killer come after me. I believe that many children recognize Harry Potter for what it is, fantasy literature. I'm sure there will always be some that take it too far, but that's the case with everything. I believe it's much better to engage in dialog with children to explain the difference between fantasy and reality. Then they are better equipped to deal with people who might have taken it too far. — J.K. Rowling

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum. — Azar Nafisi

Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality. — Mildred D. Taylor

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. Stop them reading what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like - the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature - you'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant. — Neil Gaiman

A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first. — Lizette Woodworth Reese

A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book. — K. Lamb

I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult. — Lois Lowry

Harry's status as orphan gives him a freedom other children can only dream about (guiltily, of course). No child wants to lose their parents, yet the idea of being removed from the expectations of parents is alluring. The orphan in literature is freed from the obligation to satisfy his/her parents, and from the inevitable realization that his/her parents are flawed human beings. There is something liberating, too, about being transported into the kind of surrogate family which boarding school represents, where the relationships are less intense and the boundaries perhaps more clearly defined. — J.K. Rowling

When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story — Tushar Upreti

Adults ... struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real. — Grant Morrison

Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had. — Bill Buford

family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family's socioeconomic status.14 I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties. In — Charles Murray

In this quiet corner, the best wild flowers grow, and the first peepers are heard in the spring, even before the snow melts. Here, owls call from the treetops in the early morning, and the irreverent crows hold their noisy conventions. Here, the mother deer has her fawn, and the migrating geese come to rest. It is here that the fox is safe from the hunters. — Alice Provensen

Would you like some more pancakes? Annie asked. I could tell that Annie was a smart girl. I hate to eat on the job. But I must keep up my strength. — Marjorie Weinman Sharmat

Children's literature as a literary aberration or at best a minor amusement is a notion held most strongly by people who read the fewest children's books. I think it was Ruth Hill Viguers who compared this attitude with asking a pediatrician when he's going to stop fooling around and get down to the serious business of treating adults. — Lloyd Alexander

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We're alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes (not to mention critics) do the best they can, but they may - they probably will - be scoffed at by their children's children. We, the living readers, whether or not we're members of juries, decide, all on our own, if we suspect ourselves to be in the presence of greatness. We're compelled to let future generations make the more final decisions, which will, in all likelihood, seem to them so clear as to produce a sense of bafflement over what was valued by their ancestors; what was garlanded and paraded, what carried to the temple on the shoulders of the wise. — Michael Cunningham

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach - just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. "I thought a lighthouse is out at sea. — Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

We would learn as much as we could, be as honourable as we could, be as courageous as we could, and be as happy as we could. — S.L. Mills

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. — Orson Scott Card

Grigoryevich...Not that he had any real talent himself - but what a lot of deaths of talented people he had witnessed. Young physicists and historians, specialists in ancient languages, philosophers, musicians, young Russian Swifts and Erasmuses - how many of them he had seen put on their "wooden jackets." Prerevolutionary literature had often lamented the fate of serf actors, musicians, and painters. But who was there today to write about the young men and women who had never had the chance to write their books and paint their paintings? The Russian earth is indeed fertile and generous. She gives birth to her own Platos, to her own quick-witted Newtons - but how casually and terribly she devours these children of hers. — Vasily Grossman

Children's books are looked on as a sideline of literature. A special smile. They are usually thought to be associated with women. I was determined not to have this label of sentimentality put on me so I signed by my intials, hoping people wouldn't bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo. — P.L. Travers

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. — Lloyd Alexander

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children
Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together — Alfred North Whitehead

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

'Harry Potter' opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love. — Rick Riordan

Have a little faith in your sons. This journey will be the making of them. — C.J. Milbrandt

It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor's mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn't. And every day everything in her whole past life - the real things and the imaginary things - was being pushed farther and farther back, because going to high school was so enormous, so vast! so different from all of Eleanor's life before. The milling crowds in the hall between classes, all those jostling elbows and swollen shoulders and bosoms, all those enormous hands and feet, they pushed and thumped and shoved at Eleanor's childhood, until there was no room anymore for anything but now, right now, a hurrying rushing now that was just incredibly thrilling, or absolutely rotten and just disgusting, this heaving present moment, right now. — Jane Langton

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes. — Joyce Carol Oates

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. — Anne Thaxter Eaton

A skunk is walking by. Skunks don't hurry or hide. The dogs and cats pretend not to notice them. It is best not to. — Alice Provensen

Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl ... there was a boy ... there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did ... and what he did ... and how they learned to survive it. This is what they did ... and why one failed ... and why another triumphed in the end. And I know that it's true, because I danced at their wedding and drank their very best wine. — Terri Windling

The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary - culturally and biologically - for the optimal development of a human being."12 In a summary of the relevant science, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same: Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that - on average - men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.13 — Sherif Girgis

They were ... no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved. — Gloria Goldreich

To introduce children to literature is to instal them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find. — Charlotte Mason

Writing for children can be completely honest in non-cynical ways. In adult books you're required to be cynical. It embarrasses us to say positive things. You can have affection and hope in children's books, but that is out of fashion in adult fiction. — Lloyd Alexander

To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, cynicism of intellect; promise of the present. — Bill Grigsby

The smaller girl hid her eyes with her hands, and Ewan smiled. Did she think that would make her invisible? — C.J. Milbrandt

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years
about twelve of them
to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. — E.L. Konigsburg

If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too! — Jeff Hutchins

Like most people, I have several pet subjects - that may or may not be interesting to other people. Don't get me started on happiness, or habits, or children's literature, or Winston Churchill, unless you really want to talk about it. — Gretchen Rubin

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early. — Rita Dove

She asked where he lived.
Second to the right,' said Peter, 'and then straight on till morning. — J.M. Barrie

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983) — Susan Cooper

Jocelyn did not want to always remain the same. Where was the adventure in that? — Heidi Schulz

My grandma, Mrs Grace Ayorkor Acquah said 'Educating the child is everybody's business. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances.
'Did he bite you?' said Father.
'No,' said Frances.
'Did he scratch you?' said Mother.
'No,' said Frances.
'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep. — Russell Hoban

The fire in the evening was the best of all. Peter said is wasn't fie, but he couldn't tell me what it really was. You can thought, Grandfather, can't you?'
'It's the sun's way of saying goodnight to the mountains' he explained. 'He spreads that beautiful light over them so that they won't forget him till he comes back in the morning. — Joanna Spyri

As far as I can tell, it doesn't make any difference to adults how clever children are. They always stick together. Unless you are sick or dying or mortally wounded, they will always side with the other adult. — R.L. LaFevers

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it. — Gretchen Rubin

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. — Ernst F. Schumacher

Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals. — John Kendrick Bangs

Our great problem, is that children now know whatever they want to know - at the press of a button they can discover all horrors of the adult world. They know very early on that the world is sometimes a very dark, difficult and complex place, and the literature they read must reflect that. Otherwise we're just entertaining them to pass the time. — Michael Morpurgo

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go. — X.J. Kennedy

The deepwood is vanished in these islands
much, indeed, had vanished before history began
but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling's story 'Puck of Pook's Hill,' it is by right of 'Oak and Ash and Thorn' that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history. — Robert Macfarlane

She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.
Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books. — Garth Nix

What about you?" I ask her. "What do you think I should read next?" She takes my hand and leads me to the children's section. She looks around for a second, then heads over to a display at the front. I see a certain green book sitting there and panic. "No! Not that one!" I say. But she isn't reaching for the green book. She's reaching for Harold and the Purple Crayon. "What could you possibly have against Harold and the Purple Crayon?" she asks. "I'm sorry. I thought you were heading for The Giving Tree." Rhiannon looks at me like I'm an insane duck. "I absolutely HATE The Giving Tree." I am so relieved. "Thank goodness. That would've been the end of us, had that been your favorite book." "Here - take my arms! Take my legs!" "Take my head! Take my shoulders!" "Because that's what love's about!" "That kid is, like, the jerk of the century," I say, relieved that Rhiannon will know what I mean. "The biggest jerk in the history of all literature, — David Levithan

One of my pet irritations today is the whole idea that the great interest and upsurge in books about black life has just come along. 1937 and 1938 were the years when the interest in this whole subject was born.

from "Guidelines for Black Books: An Open Letter to Juvenile Editors" (1969) in Children and Literature (1973) — Augusta Baker

I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature. — Anne Holm

There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married.
How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that? — Eleanor Brown

This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It's where Sunnybank Lad met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned, Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died, and, on an endless gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling. — Jo Ann Beard