George MacDonald Quotes

I was the kind of girl who'd peep through her bedroom keyhole to check if her dolls were moving.

Oh, grown-ups cannot understand, And grown-ups never will, How short the way to fairyland Across the purple hill.

I had a pretty sexual imagination for a kid.

I bugged my mom and dad to 'get me inside the television set' when I was about four years old.

I am always fascinated by the way kids create their own world. That is something I am very attentive to anywhere I go.

I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my shelf.

Some things, I think, like fairy books and secret doors, are only meant to be found by children.

The child who has no need to feign empirical knowledge about life can wonder and fantasise with great ease. The world is his oyster, or any other thing he wants it to be.

Children live in a world filled with possibilities. Their thoughts roam without boundaries, like dreams – full of images, places and actions. Unlike adults, they can’t temper their imaginations with experience. So, when a child plays with a toy or reads a story, it becomes an adventure, a new reality to them.

Children see magic because they look for it.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them. For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they had met their dead father and had a game with him.

I try to convey this feeling of being innocent in a mystical state, being in a place that's new, seeing things with brand new eyes, for better or worse. I just imagine this little kid floating on a beautiful king-size bed over the city at night, seeing all sorts of crazy stuff happening in the world. To me, half the fun is all the stories other people have.

There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it...until they have grown so old that they forget the way. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again...The world calls them singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

I had to try to figure out what it would be like to do things for the first time, almost as if you're a child.

Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances. 'Did he bite you?' said Father. 'No,' said Frances. 'Did he scratch you?' said Mother. 'No,' said Frances. 'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.

If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

And that's when I realized, when you're a kid you don't need a costume, you ARE superman.

When you're quite young, your imagination's quite free.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour!

My mother lived her life through movies and books - she read everything there was to read. And she read to me every night. I never went to sleep without her reading to me. And she fantasized about the book and she would talk about it, the place, and you would think that after she read the book and after she told you stories about it, that she had actually been there. I learned about story from her, and I learned the value of a great story, and the value of great characters.

I want to see everything. I guess the positive version of not seeing or not knowing would be preservation of fantasy.

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.