Dreams And Wishes Quotes

“When we are children, we have a tranquil acceptance of mystery which is driven out of us later on, by curiosity and education and experience. But it is possible to find one's way back. With affection and respect, I disagree totally with Penelope Lively's conviction about the 'absolute impossibility of recovering a child's vision.' There _are_ ways, imperfect, partial, fleeting, of looking again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have. Children are not different animals. They are us, not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“The child I was is the only child I really know.' That's it. I can still feel what it was like to be that child of the 1940s from inside; I am still the same mixture of insecurity and determination, shyness and arrogance, curiosity and fear. I have the same talent she had; the same imagination. I write for her, for that child, and so it is true when I say I write for myself.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“The Age of the Screen isn't going to go away; indeed it offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities, if it could just acquire a little more quality control. But there is one truth, one necessary dictum, that we must never forget: _Every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own - and the author's - dream_. There is no substitute. None.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“But the slice-of-life novel is really not so much a world apart as an interlude - like the conference or the film set, the holiday hotel or the voyage by sea or air. You enter it, you live there for a while, you leave again. Perhaps it will alter you; usually it will not. I suspect that the book which takes you into a world apart must also _trouble_ you, at least a little. And the troubling stays with you, like the grit in the oyster, and afterwards you are changed.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“Words stretch the muscles of the imagination. Continual placid acceptance of ready-made visual images turns the imagination into a couch-potato.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“Writing is one of the loneliest professions in the world because it has to be practiced in this very separate private world, in _here_. Not in the mind; in the imagination. And I think it is possible that the writing of fantasy is the loneliest job of the lot, since you have to go further inside. You have to make so close a connection with the unconscious that the unbiddable door will open and the images fly out, like birds.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“The Roman Englishman put his road from London to Bath, along valleys and around hills.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“No child is wholly wrapped in the present who has grown up seeing a Norman castle from his or her bedroom window.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children

“In America . . . the sense of man/s relationship with the land can be found only in the Southwest.”
― Susan Cooper, Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children