Quotes of Note:
Barbara Harrison, Betty Levin, Katherine Paterson

By the very act of writing, some children’s authors make a political statement. Children cannot be written off. Children are not an undifferentiated mass; they are not nonpersons.

They have names and dreams.

Barbara Harrison
Children's Literature New England 1994

Children who find a single important life in the ordinary, unimportant, and unheroic are less likely to succumb to the human fallacy of

Us versus Them. They will be less likely to accept the notion that thousands of terrified refugees of war do not feel as we do, or that millions crammed into cattle cars on journeys they could not escape belong to a subhuman horde.

Betty Levin
Children's Literature New England 1995

Perhaps the most troubling phrase

to come out of the Gulf War

was the oft repeated sentence of our leaders:
"Thank God there was so little loss of life.”

And yet we know that 100,000 men, women, and

children died in that war.

A woman in Ohio has made

a mural with 100,000 faces on it.

It takes a long time, my friends, to walk past 100,000 faces.

Katherine Paterson
Children's Literature New England 1993