Maurice Sendak Quotes

Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery.

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

I finally understand that it’s okay to be a little afraid of things but that obsessing over them does not mean you have any more control over what you fear.

And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

A lot of my work has been about stuff I've been frightened of: cliffs, explosions, meteorites, that kind of stuff. I would have been this trembling blob of fear if I hadn't got into making art, which is a good way of deferring it.

I think safely experiencing fear by watching a horror movie makes real life a little less frightening.

What I work hardest at is just trying to not let things get me crazy.

At first, when a child meets something that scares him, the fear grows, like a wave. But when he goes into the water and swims - gets used to the water - the wave grows small. If we pull the child away when the wave is high, he never sees that, never learns how to swim and remains afraid. If he gets a chance to feel strong, in control, that's called coping. When he copes, he feels better.

What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society's business were making people insteadof profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?

It's a shame that humans don't come with reset buttons.

Music itself isn't enough to completely wear down my stash of anger. And I don't have all that much more to be angry about than anyone else. It's not like I was abused as a kid or anything. I had a pretty comfortable childhood with parents who took good care of me. But resentment exists, and some of it goes into the music. Some of it goes into physical activity.

What are children anyway? Midget drunks. They greet you in the morning by kneeing you in the face and talking gibberish. They can't even walk straight.

I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.

Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so.

Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them ... ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That's what the world needs.

To allow the fear to come on you and then pass through. If you keep cutting the fear off by intervening - let's say, taking a Xanax to try to cure it - you'll never understand what fear is really for. Fear is part of a survival mechanism. The way you conquer fear is to feel it all the way, and then you'll find out that there's nothing there - it's just emotion.

You are the real teachers. You have these children when they are at their emotional peaks and lows. That's when they are the most pliable. It doesn't take any intelligence to send a kid home with his head hanging between his knees. But to send him home with his head up every night might show a little coaching.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

Dear friend, I feel great! I really mean it. I have to remember his for the next time I'm having a terrible week. Have you wer done that? You feel really bad, and then it goes away, and you don't know why. I try to remind myself when I feel great like this that there will be another terrible week coming someday, so I should store up as many great details as I can, so during the next terrible week, I can remember those details and believe that I'll feel great again. It doesn't work a lot, but I think it's very important to try.

There's a part of me that is angry. Not in the sense of, "Gee, George is an angry guy!" I mean, anyone who's been with me five minutes, five years, whatever, they would tell you they've rarely seen me in a moment of anger. Yes, I can become highly irritated in a line that's moving slowly, or with a clerk who's incompetent. But I don't yell. I don't get rude. I am clear about what I expect. In a store, my mother always told me, "Ask for the manager immediately. It changes the tone of the conversation."

A child's mental health is just as important as their physical health.

Sometimes it’s all you can do,” he murmured. “Fight back; run wild, until you get it all out.” “Sometimes there is nothing to fight and nowhere to run.

Please don't tell me to relax, it's only my tension that's holding me together.

We don't really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don't encourage boys to be whole.