A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.
Interpretation
A good picture book resonates with the reader, much like a melody that evokes emotion.
Margaret Wise Brown highlights the intrinsic beauty and rhythm of a well-crafted picture book, suggesting that the storytelling within it produces a unique emotional resonance, akin to a melody that captivates and enchants. This metaphor emphasizes the importance of both visual and narrative elements in children's literature, where the combination creates a harmonious experience for the reader.
In practice
During a reading event, I used this quote to highlight the artistic value of children's books.
In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been--it may even be greater--for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.
I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.
Skateboarding is as much, or more, an art of mode of expression than it is a sport. What skateboarding has given me is precisely that: a form of expression that drew me to it, and, in so doing, I was able to express and be who I wanted to be through it, in a sense.
I say 'spectacle' rather than 'story' because in the end, it isn't the intricacies of narrative that draw us to horror films. When it's there, I'm grateful for the director's skill at telling an exquisitely nuanced tale filled with psychological insight, but it is the spectacles that I take home with me.
Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.
The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
Ideas aren't real estate, they grow collectively and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art.
This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.
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