Quote

From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

Maurice Sendak

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Maurice Sendak
Age: 83 †
Born: 1928
Born: June 10
Died: 2012
Died: May 8
Artist
Cartoonist
Graphic Designer
Illustrator
Painter
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Maurice Bernard Sendak
Children
Achieve
Wild
Taming
Mean
Term
Familiar
Frustrations
Years
Lives
Emotions
Catharsis
Things
Fear
Anxiety
Intrinsic
Means
Fantasy
Earliest
Part
Everyday
Cope
Best
Terms
Continually
Live
Emotion
Frustration
Disrupting

More quotes by Maurice Sendak

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If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.
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Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I'm concerned. He's not to be trusted.
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I don't know how to write a children's book.
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I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.
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Oh, please don't go — we'll eat you up — we love you so!
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I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.
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We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.
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Dreams raise the emotional level of what I'm doing at the moment.
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It is such an abundance of idiocy that you lose courage. That you lose hope. I don't want to lose hope. I get through every day. I'm pretty good. I work. I sleep. I sing. I walk.
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I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.
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Kids lead a very private life.
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One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.
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I think there is something barbaric in children, and it's missing in lots of books for them because we don't like to think of it. We want them to be happy [but] childhood is a very tough time.
Maurice Sendak
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It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.
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I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
Maurice Sendak
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I never can satisfy some need in me to achieve something of incredible hight. For my sake. It puzzles me deeply. And it sours my life. So there is a permanent dissatisfaction.
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I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.
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Children do live in fantasy and reality they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
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I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.
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That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?
Maurice Sendak