Parenting & Family Quote by Diana Wynne Jones

Jones slips a quiet provocation into what sounds, at first, like childhood nostalgia: for a kid, fantasy isnt an escape hatch from reality, its realitys operating system. That opening move matters. It reframes imagination not as a decorative add-on but as the primary way a young mind tests the world - not by cataloging whats already there, but by running scenarios: wicked, dire, normal, whatever. Fantasy becomes a laboratory for emotional truth, a place where dread and desire can be handled at full intensity without the social penalties of being too earnest, too frightened, too strange.

The second sentence is the sharper blade. "Anything really close to home" reads like a dismissal of domestic realism, but the subtext is more strategic: proximity can be a kind of censorship. The too-familiar invites polite recognition, the comforting nod, the tidy lesson. Jones is arguing that the good book should not merely mirror your kitchen table; it should estrange you from it, so you can see it clearly. Distance - invented worlds, impossible rules, magic with consequences - is what lets a story get at what home feels like when youre living inside it.

Contextually, its also a defense of childrens literature against the old suspicion that fantasy is frivolous. Jones, writing in a British tradition that runs from E. Nesbit to Tolkien, insists that the unreal is where the real gets negotiated. Her best books dont avoid home; they smuggle it into the castle, the portal, the spell, and make it impossible to ignore.