I saw this quote while browsing on Pinterest, and I had to share it. Only after I’d posted it on Facebook did I realize I didn’t know the quote’s authenticity. Silly me! I hate unattributed quotes!
A quick search on Google turned up an essay by C.S. Lewis called “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” Wouldn’t you know it, the website Catholic Culture has the whole thing online!
(I kind of love that a Catholic website has the full text of an Anglican writer. Yeah, we claim him as “practically Catholic.”)
The whole essay is amazing, especially for those who work with children. But I especially loved this jab at adults who look down on the things of childhood:
To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But the on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development: When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
G.K. Chesterton has written quite a bit on the importance of fairy tales, as has Tolkien, which really really really makes me want to research all three and prepare a talk… for some Catholic group… I haven’t really figured that part out yet. But one of my friends said he’d “totally go to that talk,” so I think I’ll try to make that happen.
Happy reading!
Katie: Librarian Lady 