mason

When the world was spinning they pushed my hand into the hand of a girl and she took me to a room with a red bulb. magazine photos of women.dirty sheets.shelf (empty glass.Our Lady of Sorros.plastic flowers.book with torn spine). She said, You are not normal. I didn’t say anything. I was busy cataloging her sorrows. There was Abandonment.Loneliness.Love.Violence, she wore them on her face. She touched me. I said nothing.waited.watched her move, a movement between a ship at sea and grass swaying, above weeping and below laughter. (Daniel Mason, “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth,” in Harper’s Magazine, April 2005, p. 80)

gag

Every child goes through many phases of development, each phase with its own needs and interests. I know I should feel bitterly cheated if, as a child, I had been deprived of all fairy lore; and it does not seem to me that we have the right to deprive any child of its rightful heritage of Fairyland. In fact, I believe it is just the modern children who need it, since their lives are already overbalanced on the side of steel and stone and machinery - and nowadays, one might well add, bombs, gas-masks and machine guns. (Wanda Gág, "I Like Fairy Tales," in The Horn Book [1939], quoted in Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, p. 94).