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His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever bee...more

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Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

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It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

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I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappoin...more

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Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be s...more

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I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies...

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Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.'I said, ...more

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I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they alw...more

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Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths

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Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to ...more

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I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

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Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

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I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wro...more