There's A Rule, I Think. You Get

The Great Subversive Works Of Children's Literature Suggest That There Are Other Views Of Human Life Besides Those Of The Shopping Mall And The Corporation. They Mock Current Assumptions And Express The Imaginative, Unconventional, Noncommercial View Of The World In Its Simplest And Purest Form. They Appeal To The Imaginative, Questioning, Rebellious Child Within All Of Us, Renew Our Instinctive Energy, And Act As A Force For Change. This Is Why Such Literature Is Worthy Of Our Attention And Will Endure Long After More Conventional Tales Have Been Forgotten.

In A Sense Much Great Literature Is Subversive, Since Its Very Existence Implies That What Matters Is Art, Imagination, And Truth. In What We Call The Real World, On The Other Hand, What Usually Counts Is Money, Power, And Public Success.

When Other People First Became Aware Of The Cow, They Expressed Concern And Anxiety. They Suggested Strategies For Getting The Animal Out Of Molly's Parlor: Remedies And Doctors And Procedures, Some Mainstream And Some New Age. They Related Anecdotes Of Friends Who Had Removed Their Own Cows In One Way Or Another. But After A While They Had Exhausted Their Suggestions. Then They Usually Began To Pretend That The Cow Wasn't There, And They Preferred For Molly To Go Along With The Pretense.

You Get Into The Habit Of Being Angry And Hurt By Life, And Then When Something Good Happens You Can't Accept It Because It Doesn't Fit The Pattern.

But I Think That Sometimes, When One's Behaved Like A Rather Second-rate Person, The Way I Did At Breakfast, Then In A Kind Of Self-destructive Shock One Goes And Does Something Really Second-rate. Almost As If To Prove It.