“Sitting before his painted book, [the child] makes the Taoist vision
of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the
book’s surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted
partitions to enter a stage on which the fairy tale lives. Hua, the Chinese word for ‘painting’ is much like gua, meaning ‘attach’: you attach five colors to the things. In German, the word used in anlegen:
you ‘lay on’ colors. In such an open color-bedecked world where
everything shifts at every step, the child is allowed to join in the
game. Draped with colors of every hue that he has picked up from
reading and viewing, the child stands in the center of a masquerade and
joins in.”

—Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.