Life & Wisdom Quote by Lloyd Alexander

Writing, for Lloyd Alexander, isn’t a performance of cleverness so much as a stubborn act of translation. “All that writers can do” sounds modest, even a little fatalistic: the toolkit is limited, the medium is slippery, and language will always lag behind lived feeling. The power of the line is how it lowers the stakes while raising the moral bar. You may not change the world; you may not even say it perfectly. But you can keep trying.

Alexander’s subtext is a quiet rebuke to the market version of authorship: the hustle for relevance, the branding, the temptation to write toward trends instead of inward truth. “Deepest in their hearts” isn’t Hallmark sentiment here; it’s a claim about craft. Depth implies excavation, the unglamorous work of returning to the same emotional mine until you finally hit something honest. “Keep trying” acknowledges that the attempt is iterative, that failure isn’t a sign you’re not a writer but the condition of being one.

Context matters: Alexander, best known for The Chronicles of Prydain, wrote for young readers without condescending to them. That’s where the line lands hardest. Children’s literature often gets treated as a genre of lessons or escapism; Alexander frames it as a venue for the most serious human material, smuggled in through story. The quote defends sincerity against cynicism and insists that the writer’s real job isn’t to manufacture meaning, but to keep reaching for it, sentence by sentence, knowing the reach will always exceed the grasp.