Parenting & Family Quote by Kate DiCamillo

DiCamillo frames childhood less as a phase you outgrow than as a permanent creative engine: a private mythology she keeps mining because it still pays out in wonder. The line does two jobs at once. It’s an origin story - reassuringly coherent, almost inevitable - and it’s a craft statement that quietly rejects the adult literary pose of cool detachment. She’s telling you that the most “serious” work she does is powered by the least cynical part of her life.

The phrasing matters. “Everything I write” is a bold, totalizing claim that doubles as permission: if your material feels small or personal, it can still be inexhaustible. Then she softens it with “in one way or another,” acknowledging that memory is not a filing cabinet but a set of echoes. She isn’t promising autobiography; she’s describing emotional source code.

“Mystery and wonder and possibility” isn’t just a nostalgic list - it’s a thesis about why children’s literature works when it works. Kids live in a world where rules are half-explained and outcomes feel negotiable; DiCamillo’s best stories bottle that atmosphere. The subtext is also defensive in the smartest way: wonder isn’t naive, it’s a discipline. To keep returning to it “forever” is to insist that imagination is not escapism but a way of staying permeable to the world’s strangeness.

Contextually, coming from a writer whose books often sit at the crossroads of tenderness and loss, the quote hints at a deeper wager: that childhood’s radiance can coexist with grief, and that the writer’s job is to make room for both without condescension.