Michael Fitzgerald > Michael's Quotes

“Well," Mamma began, "there are some people who think we are different from them. They don't understand what scientists have taught us, that all the peoples of the world are one family and that all human blood is the same. They don't realize that we all have the same Heavenly Father, and they forget that this country is for all people to have an equal chance.”
― Marguerite de Angeli, Bright April

“The child cannot too early learn to be a good citizen? I think this is questionable: citizenship is an adult affair. Let school and home teach the child to respect the laws and institutions of his country. For the time being that should suffice. To use the juvenile novel or biography to turn the child into an internationalist or an advocate of racial tolerance may be high-minded, but I would suggest that the child first be allowed to turn into a boy or girl. Pious Little Rollo is dead; the Good Little Citizen is replacing him. The moralistic literature of the last century tried to produce small paragons of virtue. How about our urge to manufacture small paragons of social consciousness?”
― Clifton Fadiman, Party Of One

“It is natural if you feel as strongly as most decent people do about racial discrimination to welcome books that give it short shrift; but to assess books on their racial attitude rather than their literary value, and still more to look on books as ammunition in the battle, is to take a further and still more dangerous step from literature-as-morality to literature-as-propaganda—a move toward conditions in which, hitherto, literary art has signally failed to thrive.

("Didacticism in Modern Dress" from Only Connect (2nd ed., 1980).”
― John Rowe Townsend

“Another danger is that—as is already happening to some extent—authors and editors run scared and go to absurd lengths to avoid giving offence. (An American editor rejected Polar, a picture book about a toy polar bear which is published in England by Andre Deutsch, on the ground that the text, written by Elaine Moss, states explicitly that the bear is white). A demand to avoid stereotypes can easily become in effect a demand for a different stereotype: for instance that girls should always be shown as strong, brave and resourceful, and that mothers should always have jobs and never, never wear an apron. And books written to an approved formula, or with deliberate didactic aim, do not often have the breath of life. Some members of women’s groups in North America have published their own anti-sexist books, featuring such characters as fire-fighting girls or boys who learn to crochet. Good luck to them; but those I have seen are far below professional standard.

("Are Children's Books Racist and Sexist?" from Only Connect, 2nd ed., 1980)”
― John Rowe Townsend

“Reading to younger children has come to be more or less an accepted thing, but reading to older children or to a family group is done less today with all the other attractions taking the time. Reading to a group provides a unity, a cohesion, that is wonderful. It is common bond of interest. It brings up plenty of things for family talk and discussion. A child who has been read to shows results in his speech and wider experience with languages. And definitely, if the reading is of good books, it is the beginning of good taste in literature.”
― Phyllis R. Fenner, The Proof of the Pudding: What Children Read

“While they read these stories, moreover—and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often—boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland’s last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace.”
― Anne Thaxter Eaton, Reading with Children

“Certain present-day tendencies make us wonder if succeeding generations of young people are not in danger of growing up impervious to style and insensitive to the quality of real literature.

Granted the need for books for beginners in which the vocabulary is adapted to their ability, it is nevertheless disconcerting to find editors rewriting classics for children in what they consider to be more suitable language. Working material to aid a child’s learning process, material which is interesting and appropriate for his age, is needed, of course, but it should be provided without reducing a masterpiece to the commonplace.

To the average fortunate child the classics among books written for children, and the classics in adult literature suitable for boys and girls, come naturally into his experience at a time when they can be appreciated and enjoyed. In the midst of the flood of the mediocre which assails the young person of the present day, a classic, here and there—Alice, Robinson Crusoe, Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, Gulliver’s Travels—provides, albeit unconsciously to the children, a touchstone to distinguish the work of a master hand from that of a journeyman. When these classics are rewritten, however, and “modified as to vocabulary,” the touchstone loses its power.”
― Anne Thaxter Eaton, Reading with Children

“This initial impulse, this enduring faith in reading books to know them and to make them useful, has somehow been lost - not, I feel, because we are of lesser stature than our predecessors, but because, perhaps, there have been such pressures, such multitudinous forces at work upon the culture of our generation - economic, political, mechanical, and inventive - and the joyous obligation to read and to induce others to read seemed too simple a function in a world where everything and everybody were being mechanized, organized, industrialized, streamlined, geared for action in two wars, emotionally adjusted for a depression, progressively educated, and made socially conscious.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“In the new courses which are now to be introduced into library schools, we are to stress the psychology and sociology of reading! The study of the motivations, needs, and purposes of readers! I cannot predict what this will mean for the adult readers. It conjures up in my irrelevant mind a grim picture of some gentle old lady who has been reading for years along her own lines of interest suddenly encountering a bright young thing just out of library school who insists upon psychoanalyzing her before she is allowed to read Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker. [...]”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“[...] But in my own field, I can tell you what happens to books when they are put to these uses. They are examined for "developmental values," or read because they teach the concept of "relative size," or because of "good human relations," or "interracial concepts," or "vocabulary content." But when one searches for values and pushes them as if they were plums in a pudding, one destroys the texture and proportion of the pudding itself, and the art of pudding-making and the eating thereof are destroyed.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“Recently, an internationally renowned writer for children commented about the Council [on Interracial Books for Children, Inc.] to me: “Of course, we should all be more tender and understanding toward the aged and we should work to shrive ourselves of racism and sexism, but when you impose guidelines like theirs on writing, you’re strangling the imagination. And that means that you’re limiting the ability of children to imagine. If all books for them were ‘cleansed’ according to these criteria, it would be the equivalent of giving them nothing to eat but white bread.”
“To write according to such guidelines,” this story teller continued, “is to take the life out of what you do. Also the complexity, the ambivalence. And thereby the young reader gets no real sense of the wonders and terrors and unpredictabilities of living. Paradoxically, censors like the council clamor for ‘truth’ but are actually working to flatten children’s reading experiences into the most misleading, simplistic kinds of untruth.”

("Any Writer Who Follows Anyone Else's Guidelines Ought to Be in Advertising" (1977), from Beyond Fact: Nonfiction for Children and Young People, 1982)”
― Nat Hentoff

“A wide reading in folklore not only gives the storyteller access to story resources, but it gives him also increased perception of the telling quality in books and stories other than folklore. Having acquired a new regard and respect for the integrity of the folk tale, he will have a standard of excellence by which he will be better able to judge everything he seeks to tell. He will judge the modern fantasy tale with a new understanding. Does it have respect for the character and quality of the nature of the animals with which it deals, or is it merely a pretty toying with rabbit or tiger or elephant? Is it rooted in a genuine sense of wonder, or is it based on a flimsy pretense of whimsy? Does it have form and structure, not necessarily of action but of idea? Is the supernatural treated as the unpredictable forces of evil as well as of good, or are the fairies little creatures all gauze and lace? Does it have point, climax, resolution of conflict? Does the story contribute to delight, to a child’s understanding of life? Does it increase perception? Does it leave “a residue of remembered emotion?” These are questions to ask oneself before choosing the tale to be told.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“We are flooded with books; books come pouring out of the publishing meat grinder. And, the quality has dropped severely. We may be able to print a book better, but intrinsically the book, perhaps, is not better than it was. We have a backlist of books, superb books, by Margaret Wise Brown, by Ruth Krauss, by lots of people. I’d much rather we just took a year off, a moratorium: no more books. For a year, maybe two—just stop publishing. And get those old books back, let the children see them! Books don’t go out of fashion with children; they only go out of fashion with adults. So that kids are deprived of the works of art which are no longer around simply because new ones keep coming out.

from The Openhearted Audience (1980)”
― Maurice Sendak

“One of my pet irritations today is the whole idea that the great interest and upsurge in books about black life has just come along. 1937 and 1938 were the years when the interest in this whole subject was born.

from "Guidelines for Black Books: An Open Letter to Juvenile Editors" (1969) in Children and Literature (1973)”
― Augusta Baker

“They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I’d never thought about and false assumptions that I didn’t want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, “I’m terribly sorry; I made it all up.” They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn’t read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I’d never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I’d thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983)”
― Susan Cooper

“I think something quite dreadful has been happening to criticism in the arts, particularly in America, during the last twenty years. In an age which is so much dominated by technological advance, the methods and even the jargon of science and engineering have mistakenly been adopted not only by fringe disciplines like psychology and social studies but by many arts scholars who should have known better.

from "In Defense of the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983)”
― Susan Cooper

“I once heard a panel discussion among magazine editors, who voiced their common greatest problem: to find people who can write. A generation has grown up lacking skill in composition and any sense of literary style. Though I doubt that any study of the matter has been made, my own experiences have borne out a theory that people who grow up hearing and reading folk and fairy tales throughout childhood develop not only lively imaginations, but originality in the use of words.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“Today if we persist in giving children vocabularized books, patterned writing, informational books that answer all their questions before they have asked, but that do nothing to stimulate curiosity; if we pay too much attention to the tricks used to make books sell rather than to the contents of the books; if we do not make easily available the stories and books that give children the adventures and exciting experiences they want, they will reject books. After all, the comics are always available and on television something always happens.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“I believe that the public library children’s room will always be necessary; but, if it is to survive, society in general must recognize it as necessary. I see no assurance of its survival unless it accomplishes what no other agency can.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“Success today is too often measured by statistics. Large circulation figures are very impressive to people outside of the profession and to library directors who are not familiar with the aims of the public library children’s room. However, in spite of the emphasis on tangible proof, the children’s library which accomplishes its true aims will make itself felt so positively that even the most pragmatic board of trustees should be convinced of its worth.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“Popularity of a book is not the criterion of its importance. A few very popular books are important experiences that we are glad to see many children having, but many popular books are, at best, commonplace experiences. The temptation in buying books for libraries is to buy those that “move,” that will not sit on the shelves. Yet very often the book that rests on the shelf may be the one that would be the most vivid experience of all to a certain child if he could but find it.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers

“Important books do not have to teach. We have long known that. In fact, we take a very superior attitude toward the books for children of the eighteenth century, which were written so patently to teach manners or morals or to give information. Yet if we examine a large number of new books intended supposedly for children’s pleasure reading, we see that many, many people — authors and publishers alike, and parents, because they buy them — feel that a good children’s book must be written with an acknowledged purpose.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“When I hear someone say, “Yes, it’s a good book but our children don’t like it,” I am inclined to think that either the librarian herself does not like it or has not read it. If a book is really good, if it is really alive, it is a potentially important experience for some children, perhaps only a few, but it may have a more far-reaching significance to those few than would a hundred mediocre books.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“Effort has been made sometimes, even in libraries, to plan for groups rather than for individuals. Books are bought because they appeal to many young people, and books important only to a few are often neglected. Libraries are organized to emphasize the reading trends of the many; arrangements of books are by reader interest, supposedly to capture the attention and fill the needs of all young people. Yet it is possible that something very important to a young person might be found in a dingy little volume tucked away in the stacks.”
― Ruth Hill Viguers, Margin for Surprise: About Books, Children, and Librarians

“Yesterday’s children got what was good for them. Today’s children get what they want. One of the things they don’t want very much is a book. Literacy itself is becoming yet another commodity in short supply.

from "One Thumping Lie Only" in The Thorny Paradise (1975)”
― Nicholas Fisk

“One of the hindrances to the growth of literary appreciation in the library profession is the compulsion we are under to read the latest books, whatever they are, and to keep in touch with all contemporary expression, no matter how inept, in order to answer our inquiring readers.”
― Amelia H. Munson, An Ample Field: Books and Young People

“The effort of focusing all serious attention on a small number of books and authors is to diminish awareness of the richness and variety of children's literature. It becomes impossible to grasp the development of children's literature, or the context in which individual books were written. Ultimately, the study of children's literature is the poorer for ignoring so much fine material. And children are the poorer too, given fewer opportunities to hear of books that might enrich their lives.”
― Suzanne Rahn, Rediscoveries in Children's Literature

“Only those books which consistently produce high profits are allowed to survive, and a number of "good books" have slipped quietly out of print. It is less likely than it used to be for a scholar or a teacher or a librarian - or a child - simply to come in contact with a book which is neither brand new nor extremely popular.”
― Suzanne Rahn, Rediscoveries in Children's Literature