“Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.”
“Utopia exists only in one s childhood life.”
“Old age is the new childhood.”
“Sometimes, It s awesome to be childish with your partner .Otherwise you are missing out.”
“Her mother had said the words she longed to hear. Her mother could not get along without her. She felt warm, and safe and comforted.”
“The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.”
“...people who don t live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.”
“Don t be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.”
“Beating heroin is child s play compared to beating your childhood.”
“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”
“And so seated next to my father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, Father, what is sexsin? He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case off the floor and set it on the floor. Will you carry it off the train, Corrie? he said. I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning. It s too heavy, I said. Yes, he said, and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
“Because children grow up, we think a child s purpose is to grow up. But a child s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it s been sung? The dance when it s been danced? It s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we re expected! But there is no such place, that s why it s called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can t arrange our own happiness, it s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”
“Play is the highest form of research.”
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother s shoulder, and said, Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
“One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.”