Top 1200 Children's Books Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.

If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.

I feel lucky that my career so far has included books for adults and books for kids. They're equally important to me, and I hope I get to continue writing both.

Originally I had planned to write just a couple of children's books and then, return the focus on adult literature. A funny thing happened along the way - I kept having new ideas, and then I looked up one day, and 30 years had passed!

Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

I think there's no question that there's a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don't. And it's because small children don't worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things.

I would love to get married, first of all, from my children's perspective. People don't think of children when they think of gay marriage, but I do have children, and for them to see their family validated as other families are validated and protected by our government, yes.

One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you by hiding in improbable places... But at other times they'll confront you, and you'll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn't thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can't whack you upside it.

It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.

The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.

Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.

Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain.

People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it's as if books did die out.

[People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive.

I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn't coming together for me, and thought I'll go back to children's books, and almost immediately I started 'Holes,' and it just seemed to take off on me.

I could not write my books without the library's help. Even with the ease of Internet research, I find books to be indispensable when I am writing. ... Books make me laugh, cry, and think. They give me insight into history, and into the lives of people in other cultures. They help me make important decisions, and they provide endless entertainment. Hooray for libraries!

I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.

Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

I separate myself from my characters as much as possible, but I have these books that I create which are interactive diaries/timelines/memory books/pictures of the character's entire world.

Libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide - between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.

So much for the right books; the right use of them is another matter. The children must enjoy the book. The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea.

Intuitively, one would assume if you don't grow up with other children you might not learn that easy give and take. What often happens is that there are some only children who act that way, and that stands out more than the only children who seem to get along with others.

I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.

All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn't get it. Those books don't understand. Nobody understands.

It would be hard to imagine Heaven without children. It wouldn't be Heaven! It would be a pretty boring place without children. What are we going to do, all get to be old people and then stagnate and that's the end of it? Once all those that are already born grow up, the place would really lack life without new generations of children! If there were no children, it would be a dead society.

'Get Skinny' is my sixth book. I look over the books that I've written, and my subject matters are varied, and I write books pertaining to that which I'm dealing with at the moment.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

It's funny, when you look back in history books or American cookery books, one of the reasons that the quinces and cranberries are used so often is because of their natural jelling properties.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

I love New York City in the fall, and one of my favorite events of the season is the annual World of Children Award Gala, at which I have the profound pleasure of meeting the newest class of changemakers for children who are there to receive their World of Children Award.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.

Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.

In general it's good to give children as wide a choice as possible, and there is no harm in encouraging children to play with 'typical' toys for the opposite sex. But whether they should be trying to change children is a more ethical decision; I think we should be supporting a child's interests, whatever they are.

Children need stimulation and stability. That can come from grandparents, cousins, teachers, nannies, childcare centres - as long as they engage with the children and are really fond of them. There are also times when children need to be left alone to learn to be independent and to encourage their imaginary friends.

A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children's laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.

It's strange: I've done so many things up until I did 'Obvious Child,' including writing children's books and making 'Marcel the Shell.' To me, the through-line is incredibly clear: it all comes from wanting to be connected to my own inner voice and not wanting to be on somebody else's agenda if that means that I can't be myself.

Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.

I always give books. And I always ask for books. I think you should reward people sexually for getting you books. Don't send a thank-you note, repay them with sexual activity. If the book is rare or by your favorite author or one you didn't know about, reward them with the most perverted sex act you can think of. Otherwise, you can just make out.

It's not funny at all that we do all that advertising for children. Why is advertising for children allowed? What possible reason can there be for having those effing adverts on TV for all this crap that's made by poor people in poor countries that we sell our children who have too much?

I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts - I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I used to be able to write 10,000 words a day. It's like, 'Wow, what happened to that?' That's just gone.

When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

I do think that books, good books, free you. They make you feel a citizen of the world and things like class, sex and age don't matter. They're the greatest leveler.

May our children and our children's children to a thousand generations, continue to enjoy the benefits conferred upon us by a united country, and have cause yet to rejoice under those glorious institutions bequeathed us by Washington and his compeers.

There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Someday, our children, and our children’s children, will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world?

Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.

As parents, you may confidently rear your children according to Gods Word. While bringing up your children, you are to remember that your children are not your 'possessions' but instead are the Lords gift to you. You are to exercise faithful stewardship in their lives.