Lloyd Alexander Quotes

Every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.

"No, no," said Taran slowly, "It would be folly to think of attacking them." He smiled quickly at Fflewddur. "The bards would sing of us," he admitted, "but we'd be in no position to appreciate it."

For man to be worthy of any rank, he must strive first to be a man.

That is why your sacrifice was all the more difficult. You chose to be a hero not through enchantment but through your own manhood.

If life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.

Children's books are written to be read, adult books are written to be talked about at cocktail parties

What you may seek and what you may find are not always one.

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

I can't stand people who say 'I told you so.' That's worse than somebody coming up and eating your dinner before you have a chance to sit down.

Children may not understand all that's happening below the surface of a story. It doesn't matter. Because even though they may not be able to define or verbalize it, they sense there's something more than meets the eye; on an almost subliminal level, they're aware of a richness of texture, or meaning and emotion — a richness that, in a great book, is inexhaustible. And the child may well come back to it again and again, perhaps long after he's stopped being a child.

Stale water is a poor drink,' said Annlaw. 'Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.

"I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.
My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it."

I have never known courage to be judged by the length of a man's hair. Or, for the matter of that, whether he has any hair at all.

"You have a point," said Fronto, "and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic."

She has given you something of value: the truth in her heart.