The full quote:
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis
Comments
4 responses to “Read Fairy Tales”
One might perhaps emphasize the difference between “childish” and “childlike.” One can be a full adult, yet be childlike in one’s enjoyment of what others — more hidebound and rigid — view as childish.
Childish things, like fairy tales? Enjoyed with a childlike enthusiasm?
I never denied reading them.
No, but others have.