Last weekend’s “Aha!” moment in reading

[Discussing the very real psychological and developmental benefits of parents making the choice to expose their children to fairy tales young and repeatedly:] 

“We know that the more deeply unhappy and despairing we are, the more we need to be able to engage in optimistic fantasies.  But these are not available to us at such periods.  Then, more than at any other time, we need others to uplift us with their hope for us and our future.  No fairy tale all by itself will do this for the child… first we need our parents to instill hope in us.  On this firm and real basis – the positive ways in which our parents view us and our future – we can then build castles in the air, half aware that these are just that, but gaining deep reassurance from it nonetheless.  While the fantasy is unreal, the good feelings it gives us about ourselves and our future are real, and these real good feelings are what we need to sustain us.”

– Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales 

Just write

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
— Alan Watts

Be a sublime fool; the world needs your madness

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

— Ray Bradbury