P. A. Travers is my new favorite author ever. Everything I am arguing, she already said.

·         "My parents, I knew, would never let me be drowned in ink or have my thumb cut off by the Great Long Red-Legged Scissors Man. And it is worth asking here, I think, why we grown-ups have become so squeamish that we bowdlerize, blot out, gut, and retell the old stories for fear that truth with its terror and beauty should burst upon the children. Perhaps it is because we have lived through a period of such horror and violence that we tremble at the thought of inflicting facts upon the young. But children have strong stomachs. They can be trusted with what is true." 

·         "You should trust the children; they can stand more than we can" 

·         "Nothing will persuade me, in spite of all his poetic protestations, that Lewis Carroll wrote his books for Alice, or indeed for any child. Alice was the occasion but not the cause of his long, involved, many leveled confabulations with the curious inner world of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Of course, when it was all over, when he had safely committed it to paper, he could afford a benignant smile and the assurance that it had been done for children. But do you really believe that? I don't" 

·         "a book that is written solely for children is by definition a bad book" 

·         "Think of Milne, think of Tolkien, think of Laura Ingalls Wilder—those books not written for children, but that children nevertheless read" 

·         "You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children; for if you are honest you have, in fact, no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. And from time to time, without intention or invention, this whole body of stuff, each part constantly cross-fertilizing every other, sends up—what is the right word?—intimations" 

 Travers, P. A. "On Not Writing for Children" A Letter from the Author. Publication: Children's Literature, 10, no. 1. Publisher: Project Muse

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Travers_P._L._(Pamela_Lyndon)%2C.pdf?issn=15433374&issue=v04i0001&article=15_onwfc

I have 1 clever friend.

·         "The Grimms brought us caution tales and Kipling gave us the colonial adventures but what can you give middle class children in a safe and tame world to truly prepare them for the sad grey life of bookkeeping" 

-Jenn Chlebus (Facebook Chat 02/19/15 5:30 pm)