You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.
Interpretation
Writing for children requires greater clarity and engagement than writing for adults.
Maxim Gorky's quote emphasizes the importance of quality and creativity in children's literature, suggesting that writers should elevate their standards when addressing a younger audience. The idea is that children deserve stories that are not only accessible but also more imaginative and enriching, as they are in the formative years of understanding the world.
In practice
This quote can be used as inspiration for educators discussing the importance of children's literature.
If it is true that only misfortune can awaken a man's soul, it is a bitter truth, one that is hard to hear and accept, and it is only natural that many people deny it and say it is better for a man to live on in a trance than to wake up to torture.
What I'd like is to meet a man I could take off my hat to and say: "Thank you for having got born, and the longer you live the better.
A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him.
Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.
We need to have a course in school that teaches about ecology and gastronomy. I could imagine that all children could eat at school for free and that the cafeteria would become part of the school's curriculum.
The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.