"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

"There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book."
— Philip Pullman

"She'd always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.
"
— Sarah Beth Durst (Out of the Wild)

"She asked where he lived.

'Second to the right,' said Peter, 'and then straight on till morning.'"
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"Is this what family is like: the feeling that everyone’s connected, that with one piece missing, the whole thing’s broken? – Renny Muldoon, orphan, in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society"
— Trenton Lee Stuart

"Ourchestra:
So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly.
So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose.
So we haven't any cymbals-
We'll just slap our hands together,
And though there may be orchestras
That sound a little better
With their fancy shiny instruments
That cost an awful lot-
Hey, we're making music twice as good
By playing what we've got!"
— Shel Silverstein

"Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. "
— James M. Barrie

""A whizzpopper!" cried the BFG, beaming at her. "Us giants is making whizzpoppers all the time! Whizzpopping is a sign of happiness. It is music in our ears! You surely is not telling me that a little whizzpopping if forbidden among human beans?""
— Roald Dahl (The BFG)

"Curiouser and curiouser!"
— Lewis Carroll

"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

"then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things"
— Maurice Sendak

"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

"“To delight a child, to add a new joy to the crowded miracles of childhood, is no less worth doing than to leave a Sistine Chapel to astound a somewhat bored procession of tourists; or to have written a classic that sells by the thousands and is possessed unread by all save an infinitesimal percentage of its owners. It is, then, not an ignoble thing to do one’s very best to give our coming rulers – children – a taste of the Kingdom of Art.”"
— Gleeson White

"On Saturday he ate through one nice, green leaf, and after that he felt much better."
— Eric Carle

"Ole Golly: You know what? You're an individual, and that makes people nervous. And it's gonna keep making people nervous for the rest of your life. "
— Louise Fitzhugh

"The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten."
— Alison Lurie (Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature)

"I love letters from little kids. Adults never proclaim themselves 'your #1 fan!'"
— Lauren Baratz-Logsted

"Adversity is only yet another means to remind us of 'How Truly Awsome We All Are'!"
— W. O. Wainwright (The Adventures of Joey Zee)

"Never give a child a book you would not read yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too . . . she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett

"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