Top 42 Literature For Children Quotes
#1. It's a sort of patronizing idea that literature for children has to feature role models of exemplary behavior. I think not only is that bogus, but it leads to really boring books.
Mac Barnett
#2. 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
#3. Kid's books should be just as good as any other books. No. They should be held to a *higher* standard than other literature for the same reason that we take extra care with children's food.
Patrick Rothfuss
#4. 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
#5. If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
Madeleine L'Engle
#6. Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#7. I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.
Amber Benson
#8. I have a passion for ballad ... They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,
in the genial Summertime.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#9. We create our work for children not because they're "cute," but because they're human beings, deserving of respect.
Mo Willems
#10. Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.
Katherine Paterson
#11. I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.
Gretchen Rubin
#12. Generally speaking, all true children's stories make promises to their readers. Here you are, they say, unhandy and short, and there is a big world that one day will be yours. Listen to how it happened for Cinderella once upon a time, and Jack with his beanstalk, and Aladdin with his lamp.
John Goldthwaite
#13. Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.
Sid Fleischman
#14. If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.
Edith Schaeffer
#15. Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.
Dr. Seuss
#16. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.
J.M. Barrie
#17. Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.
Salman Rushdie
#18. Fairytales are healthy for the children. As they grow up, the magical thinking wears off, but the fairytale-induced creative brain circuits stay forever.
Abhijit Naskar
#19. It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, for they had long lost count of the days; but always if they wanted to do anything special they said this was Saturday night, and then they did it.
J.M. Barrie
#21. Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
Russell Kirk
#22. I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.
Lois Lowry
#23. Regarding children's literature, look for interesting content and well-constructed sentences clothed in literary language. The imagination should be warmed and the book should hold the interest of the child. Life's too short to spend time with books that bore us.
Deborah Taylor-Hough
#24. The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.
Jack Zipes
#25. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
#26. You must return to the fairy cave while children sleep. Fairies only exist if children believe in Fairyland. If you return after they wake from their dreams, you could remain frozen between two worlds for all eternity.
Caz Greenham
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. None of the seven is really good, for the excellent reason that Australian children never are.
Ethel Turner
#31. More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.
Sonya Hartnett
#32. 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
#33. Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist.
Adam Gopnik
#34. Themes that are "too large for adult fiction can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book" - Philip Pullman
(Hunt and Lenz, 2001, p. 122 as cited by Hunt, 2005, p. 204)
Philip Pullman
#35. In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#36. If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.
Don Roff
#37. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
Betsy Hearne
#38. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
Fernando Pessoa
#39. For the first time in his life, he decided to focus on his math homework.
Greg Pincus
#40. The work of one author or artist may stimulate another author or artist to push the edge, to take the risk, to go where the field hasn't gone before. The result -very exciting children's literature and art ... exciting both for the professional and for the intended audience, the children.
Karen Hesse
#41. Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
Michael Chabon
#42. '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
