Zilpha Keatley Snyder Quotes

I'm 12 years old in my head.

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.

Six-year-olds are very wrapped up in their own lives, and that's the way it should be.

Every child is so different. Their experience growing up and their experience relating to the world has so much to do with their temperament, and their likes and their dislikes.

It's easier for a kid to have fun and have an imagination.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.

If it's taught well, art really is important to kids early on. It helps children develop language and allows them to see themselves in a way that isn't right or wrong, because if they draw an animal with five legs instead of four, nobody's criticizing them for it.

I'm going to hang out with people, and I'm going to explore myself, and I'm okay with that.

I like someone who's not afraid to be a kid!

Get to know your kids' minds and how they think.

When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants - that that's our purpose.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

We are all born artists... Almost everything kids do is art.

I heard my name associated with the Peter Pan syndrome more than once. But really, what's so wrong with Peter Pan? Peter Pan flies. He is a metaphor for dreams and faith.

One of the best parts of growing older? You can flirt all you like since you've become harmless.

Remaining childish is a tremendous state of innocence.

I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it.

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

I don't ever want to grow up. That's boring.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

More people should read books. It's the most concentrated experience you can have.

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.