Close Looking Quotes

“When we hold a picture book, we have in our hands a pictured world full of ideas. We play with these ideas and play our own ideas around the pictured world. The more skilfull we are, and the more ideas the picture book contains, the more the ideas go on bouncing. And in the process we create something of our very own.”
― Jane Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books

“I sometimes tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen.

And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects, and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he died, that the small elephant was a gift from a friend on a day of heartbreak.

We start talking about those objects and soon it feels like our whole life is full of small stories to be grateful for. So many small things we pass all the time without holding them up to the light.”
― Ada Limon