Children S Authors

"The building themselves, from the distance, were dark and indistinct of contour, but the lights, ayyo, the lights! Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame—here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake. Even the stone causeways that vault from the island to the mainland, even those wore lanterns on posts at intervals along their reach across the water. From our acáli, I could see only the two causeways jeweled chain across the throat of night, with the city displayed between them, a splendid bright-jeweled pendant on the night's bosom. "Tenochtítlan, Cem-Anáhuac Tlali Yolóco," murmured my father. "It is truly The Heart and Center of the One World." I had been so transfixed with enchantment that I had not noticed him join me at the forward edge of our freighter. "Look long, son Mixtli. You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one.""

"My life has been long, as ours is measured. I did not die in infancy, as so many of our children do. I did not die in battle or in holy sacrifice, as so many have willingly done. I did not succumb to an excess of drinking, or to the attack of a wild beast, or to the creeping decay of The Being Eaten by the Gods. I did not die by the contracting one of the dread diseases that came with your ships, and of which so many thousands upon thousands have perished. I have outlived even the gods, who forever had been deathless and who forever would be immortal. I have survived for more than a full sheaf of years, to see and do and learn and remember much. But no man can know everything of even his own time, and this land's life began immeasurably long ages before my own. It is only of my own that I can speak, only my own that I can bring back to shadow life of your rusty black ink...."

"No man ever took better care of his life. He lived only to go on living." I waited for more, but he said no more, so I asked, "What became of him, Master Cuachic?" "He died." "That is all?" "What else ever becomes of any man? I no longer remember even his name. No one remembers anything at all about him, except that he lived and then he died."

"Your Most Lofty Majesty's royal cédula specifies that we, in providing the chronicle, shall inform ourself "from ancient Indians." This has necessitated something of a search, inasmuch as the total destruction of this city by Captain-General Hernán Cortés left us very few ancient Indians from whom to seek a credible oral history. Even the workers currently rebuilding the city consist mainly of women, children, the dolts and dotards who were unfit to fight in the sige, brute peasants conscripted form the outlying lands. Oafs, all of them."

"Think, imagine, picture yourself, Your Excellency, as that tree of great shade. See in your mind its immensity, its mighty boughs and the birds among them, the lush foliage, the sunlight upon it, the coolness it casts upon a house, a family, the girl and boy who were my sister and myself. Could Your Excellency compress that tree of great shade back into the acorn which Your Excellency's father once thrust between your mother's legs? Yya ayya, I have displeased Your Excellency and dismayed your scribes. Forgive me, Your Excellency. I should have guessed that the white men's private copulation with their white women must be different—of more delicacy—than I have seen them perform forcibly upon our women in public. And assuredly the Christian copulation that produced Your Excellency must have been even moreYes, yes, Your Excellency, I desist."

"Book people, no matter where they come from, are the best people!"

"I think the biggest part of me that seeps into my books is my appreciation of the weird, the uncanny and sometimes the horrible."

"It is hard to try and avoid your own personality when writing. One must of course put oneself into the shoes of very variable characters and try to adapt to their mindset so that they behave realistically and in accordance to their “personality”. But to do this you have to rely on your own brain and thus some of you always seeps in."

"Animals and the natural world play a huge role in my artwork as I’ve learned so much from them."

"I was working on a graphic novel when Donald Trump was elected president. My heart sunk. I could not believe that the man who had accused Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists had been elected to lead the United States. I felt unable to work, and that my stories made no sense anymore. I also felt afraid of what would come next for immigrant families like mine, like those of my friends and like those that my books had been written for and about."

"I remember loving Chato’s Kitchen by Gary Soto and Susan Guevara; I couldn’t believe that there was a book in the library about people from el barrio (actually cats, mice, and dogs), dressed, speaking, cooking, and having a family life that resembled mine. These books—and countless others—are the reason why I started making my own books (handmade at first, to emulate the books I loved)"

"(What advice would you give to young writers?) We all have our very own ways to tell stories, and you will find yours. Honor your heart and your instincts; let your story come out first, and then revise it to make it sing! More than anything else, do what gives you joy."

"I didn't have children's books when I was growing up in Mexico, but my relative's fantastic stories of little people called chaneques, and the stories of hearing la Llorona at night, filled my imagination with a world that was both unbelievable and fascinating."

"Libraries are a world where you can be safe and comfortable finding in books the things that you like the most, or things that you are curious about, or you can learn something you didn't know before. That already seems to me a path for a more beautiful world."

"Like many, I admire the multiple talents of Yuyi Morales—author, illustrator, videographer, moving speaker. I also admire Yuyi’s creative spirit."

"when I am in my studio, I constantly remind myself that steady work will give me the results I want."

"Everything in my life is an art project...to me it is all art."

"My books are a combination of my culture growing up, but also my entering a new culture as an immigrant and having to learn—to re-learn—everything so that I’d actually be able to survive in a new country."

"(about Frida Kahlo) I had just come to the United States, a place where I didn’t know how I felt about my identity as a Mexican woman, and it was her pride that had an impact on me and made me realize that I had things to be proud of too."

"Any story that can weave more than one language into a story is based in real life, because we, la gente, when we communicate, we always use many different ways of saying things. My book not only uses words, and images, but they also communicate stories with colors, forms, embroidery, and even silence. I love telling stories where English and Espanol work together to enrich the narratives, and I love it when children can play with all the languages that are part of their lives."

"When I was a little girl (I always think that these words, in precisely this juxtaposition, are six of the most charming in the language) -- when I was a little girl, I lived, between the ages of six and sixteen, in a small village in Maine."

"She was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains. (Chapter 20)"

"The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles."

""Mr. Popham is a Methodist and I'm a Congregationalist, but I say let the children go where they like, so I always take them with me." (Chapter 24)"

"Lord, I do not ask that Thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest."

""She has a nice ladylike appearance, but when she takes her bonnet off she looks seventy years old.” “She ought to keep it off, then,” returned Francesca, “ for she looked eighty with it on."

"Aunt Celia is one of those persons who are born to command, and when they are thrown in contact with those who are born to be commanded all goes as merry as a marriage bell ; otherwise not."

"He had his literary weaknesses, Charles Dickens, but they were all dear, big, attractive ones, virtues grown a bit wild and rank. Somehow when you put him -- with his elemental humor, his inexhaustible vitality, his humanity, sympathy, and pity -- beside the Impeccables, he always looms large. Just for the moment, when the heart overpowers reason, he even makes the flawless ones look a little faded and colorless."

"Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.”"

"When you have wanted something very much, and didn’t know whether you would ever get it or not, and then all at once you find you have it, you almost wish it hadn’t come so soon!"

"Salemina is so English! I can’t think how she manages. She is, in fact, more than English; she is British."

"Nothing .. can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, " The French are a gay and polite people, fond of dancing and light wines."

"Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,"

"I knew him at once!—the smiling, genial, mobile face, rather highly colored, the brilliant eyes, the watch chain, the red carnation in the button-hole, and the expressive hands, much given to gesture."

"I think my early challenges prepared me for what I do now. I can empathize because I have been there. I can relate because I know that pain."

"Remember that if you do not take care of their welfare/education, they will grow up to become the hooligans that will torment you forever."

"Life has taught me to give without expecting anything in return."

"...Marjana Savka’s poems ― lyrical, exuberant, but underwritten by a tough-minded skepticism... sum up this middle generation’s difficult and lasting achievement.”"

"Що змінилося, сестро? Куля повітряна стала свинцевою. Метафора – мертвою."

"The death of these people will leave a gaping wound in our souls, in our culture, science, economy, industry and society. This is not a metaphor; I don’t know of any poetry that can heal this wound"

"War shortens the distance from person to person, from birth to death."

"We stopped digging deep long ago in this uncertain field of ours-yours because all kinds of junk can turn up: human bones, horses’ heads, unexploded mines"

"Ось Господь. Він убитий лежить у труні. Воскресіння злетіло, здається, із графіка. Він був волонтером в останній найгіршій війні."

"Halyna Kruk has found a language to ingest violence and horror — blunt and eloquent, witty and aphoristic, her language is layered and electric as it takes on the daily dislocations of Russia’s barbaric war on Ukraine. Idiosyncratic and universal, these poems bring us necessary news as only poetry can."

"... I have still never seen a ghost for myself, even in the shadier vaults of the British Museum, where the ancient dead can lie peacefully, and many of the living have witnessed strange things. Sometimes I have crouched immobile in the evening darkness at the top level of our Victorian Arched Room library, like a wildlife photographer at a waterhole, waiting in silence for a spectral figure who has, they say, more than once been observed. For me, though, no shady visitor."

"In contrast to mourning and burial, it is the deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish forever that separates us absolutely from the whole animal kingdom. No gorilla or bald-headed eagle ever had an inkling of their inner self finishing up somewhere once the proud body had collapsed into chemicals. It is only the early human mind that grew to strive against the prospect of the final annihilation of self, a hallmark rebellion that became hard-wired into, and always an essential element of, human nature. It is the incalculable antiquity of the first stirrings towards post-mortem existence that explains the enduring and universal belief in ghosts. Ghosts have waited in the wings from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible."

"'s discoveries led to unease in more than one quarter. It was simply bizarre that a close relative of Holy Writ should emanate from such a primitive, barbaric world through so improbable a medium, to thrust itself uncompromisingly into public consciousness. How could Noah and his Ark possibly been known and important to the Assyrians of noble and the Babylonians of mad, dread ? Worried people over garden fences and in church pews clamoured to have important questions answered."

"! The world's oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!"

"In the years around the turn of the present century, relying on the contacts and expertise of , (1835–1909), put together what came to be one of the most wide-ranging and important collections of cuneiform tablets to have been assembled in private hands in this country. Since the publication of Volume 1 of The Amherst Tablets in 1908 by Pinches, followed much later by 's The Pinches Manuscript, the Amherst Collection has been familiar enough among Assyriologists, but perhaps less has been known of the collector, and of his other collections. The Museum at the family estate of Didlington Hall, Northwold, Norfolk, contained in its heyday a much broader range of material than cuneiform inscriptions. From the Near Eastern world there were very extensive collections of Egyptian papyri and antiquities, but the Hall also housed remarkable accumulations of incunabula and printed books, porcelain, tapestries, sculpture and other works of art."

"The is one of the world's best-known cuneiform inscriptions and at the same time one of the most famous archaeological objects in the British Museum in London."