I agree, and so does C.S. Lewis.collideohscopesOctober 28 2006, 18:18:23 UTC
You might enjoy this quote, though it's a bit long- it's one of my favourites:
"No book is really worth reading at age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty--except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.
...a children's story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children's story.
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time table.
And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For, in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime.
Once in a hotel dining-room, I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes." "So do I" came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities."
"No book is really worth reading at age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty--except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.
...a children's story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children's story.
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time table.
And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For, in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime.
Once in a hotel dining-room, I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes." "So do I" came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities."
-C.S. Lewis
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love
Molly
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