Christina Reads YA

"The man-in-the-street puts it in simple terms: children's literature cannot amount to much because 'it's kid stuff.' The assumption here is that by nature the child is 'inferior' to or less than the adult. His literature must be correspondingly inferior or less. Give the kid his comic, while I read grown-up books. But does not this amiable condescension shelter a certain insecurity? As racism is the opium of the inferior mind, as sexual chauvinism is the opium of the defective male, so child-patronage may be the opium of the immature adult." (Fadiman 7) 

"But we must not be too quick to pass from the dimensions of length and breadth to that of depth, and say that children's books can never be as 'deep.' The child's world is smaller than the grownup's; but are we so sure that it is shallower? Measured by whose plumbline? Is it not safer to say that, until the child begins to merge into the adolescent, his mental world, though of course in many respects akin to that of his elders, in many others obeys its own private laws of motion? And if this is so, it might be juster to use one plumbline to measure the depth of his literature, and a somewhat different one for that of his elders." (Fadiman 13) 

"A children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last." (Lewis 33) 

"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves... When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." (Lewis 34)