Tag: Alice Meynell

Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos.

Alice Meynell

In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings—a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.

Alice Meynell

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child’s foot runs.

Alice Meynell

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.

Alice Meynell

There is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal.

Alice Meynell

No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they “pretend.” That is their own word.[…] “Let’s pretend,” not “Let’s believe.” Their mother does not put “Let’s pretend” into the child’s mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.

Alice Meynell