Kate’s Reviews > Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination > Status Update

“… rather, we should turn back to the beginning of the story and read it again, and yet again until, as every parable challenges, it’s readers and listeners to do, we take the fullest possible measure of our own lives, all the while, reminding ourselves: “I am not what I ought to be, I do not the thing I ought to do!”

“Unsullied beauty is this way. For it possess the power to draw us out of our egocentrism, and then gratitude and empathy for others may move us to act justly and mercifully.”

I have to pick common place quotations out of a hat for this book. They’re as common as red breast robins in the midwest— a wonderful problem for one book to behold.

“Imagination is a power of discovery, not a power to create. The ladder capacity he reserved to God alone. Nor did MacDonald equate imagination with mere fancy, what we used to call “vain imaginings”. Rather, for him, imagination is a power of perception, a light that illumines the mystery that is hidden beneath visible reality; it is a power to help “see” into the very nature of things…”

“Bambi was inspired, and said, trembling, “There is Another who is over us all, over us and over him [the man].”
“Now I can go, said the old stag.”

I smiled the whole way through the section on The Wind in the Willows. I have such a tenderness for this tale. It will always hold my affection. Truly a favorite of mine 😭

“Communion and worship are friendship’s proper end when it is raised to its highest spiritual level.”

“For friendships to prosper, leisure and play are necessary… friendships thrive in the open air and wind and sun.”