Joan Aiken Quotes

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The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

Joan Aiken

Children read to learn — even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics, or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries; it is all new to them.

Joan Aiken

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

Joan Aiken

Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.

Joan Aiken

A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience.

Joan Aiken

Lying to him was as necessary as breathing or wrapping up against the cold — a defense against curiosity.

Joan Aiken

From the beginning of the human race stories have been used—by priests, by bards, by medicine men—as magic instruments of healing, of teaching.

Joan Aiken

Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way — with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Joan Aiken

Joan Aiken

Creative Commons

Born: September 4, 1924

Died: January 4, 2004 (aged 79)

Bio: Joan Delano Aiken was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an for her services to children's literature.

Known for:

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)
Black Hearts in Battersea (1964)
The Whispering Mountain (1968)
Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966)
The Stolen Lake (1981)

Joan Aiken on Wikipedia

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