Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.
She tries to wear her pain on the inside. She always has. It’s the trademark of the oldest sibling, I think.
When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.Laura Miller – Butterfly Weeds
Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.
because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly
I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for.
I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face.