Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.

If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Perhaps we are born knowing the tales of our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first bear them is not of surprise but of recognition.

I hate being good. -Mary Poppins

I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.