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Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise QUOTES

Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise QUOTES

1 " But the writing we call children’s fiction is not a childish thing: childish things include picking your nose and eating the contents, and tantruming at the failure to get your own way. The 45th President of America is childish. Children’s fiction has childhood at its heart, which is not the same thing. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

2 " Children’s novels...spoke and still speak of hope. They say: look, this is what bravery looks like. This is what generosity looks like. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure. Children’s books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

3 " If hope is a thing with feathers, then libraries are wings. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

4 " Children's books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

5 " When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

6 " The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

7 " For reading not to become something that we do for anxious self-optimisation – for it not to be akin to buying high-spec trainers and a gym membership each January – all texts must be open, to all people. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

8 " Children’s books in the house can be a dangerous thing in hiding: a sword concealed in an umbrella. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

9 " Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

10 " Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

11 " Children’s fiction needs to widen and change again, as it has widened and transformed before. Recently a study of children’s fiction in the UK showed that only four per cent of books published in a year had any characters who were black, Asian or minority ethnic, but that 31.2 per cent of school children are from minority ethnic origins. "

― Katherine Rundell , Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise