Kris Dersch

“Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull no one would read them.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“I never want to forget that if Lewis Carroll had asked me whether or not he should bother writing about a little girl named Alice who fell asleep and dreamed that she had a lot of adventures down a rabbit hole, it would not have sounded awfully tempting to any editor.”
― Ursula Nordstrom, Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

“...the chief reason that ["A Wrinkle in Time"] was rejected for over two years and by thirty-odd publishers was because it is a difficult book for many adults, the decision was made to market it as a children's book; it won a medal for children's books.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“...[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what's in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people's laundry if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries.
We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. That's not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair