c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There is nothing in this universe which is not in struggle to keep its existence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
No man is poor in real terms, because every man owns a great treasure: Existence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Sing the world into existence…..
— Jay Woodman
It is in the little moments that we live the longest. Everything else is existence.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Come, sleep and death; you promise nothing, you hold everything.
— Søren Kierkegaard
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
David: And you think it can just evaporate? Even if at one time they loved one another?Marx: That's one of the sad truths of existence. Nothing in this world is permanent. Even the characters created by the great Shakespeare will, in millions of years, cease to exist—when the universe runs its course and the lights go out.
— Woody Allen, Three One-act Plays: Riverside Drive/Old Saybrook/Central Park West
Science is much better at finding things that exist than at ruling out things that don't.
— Marcelo Gleiser
I am not sure the God exists
—  but I have no doubt of the Goddess existence.
There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
— Søren Kierkegaard
What are you waiting for, you little mortal! You have no time! Get up and get out and do something to protect your miraculous existence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Woody Allen once said that ‘I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.’ This is certainly a very wise wish! Whoever grasped the triviality of anything besides the existence is a wise man indeed! There is no substitute for life!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The horns of a rabbit do not inherently exist because they do not exist at all. The mere realization of their non-existence reveals that the horns of a rabbit do not inherently exist; therefore, the non-inherent existence of the horns of a rabbit is not an emptiness. An emptiness is not understood through realizing the mere non-existence of an object; it is known through comprehending in an existent object the absence of the quality of inherent or objective existence.
— Jeffrey Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness
I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions—and should be vigorously opposed.
— Steve Allen
All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn't so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause.
— Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died a Lot
In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy — what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?
— Stephen King, Misery
God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation
—  it cannot be assumed at the start.
It would take her thousands of steps to get anywhere, but she would get there easily, and when she arrived, in the present, it would seem like it had been a single movement that brought her there. Did existence ever seem worked for? One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
— Tao Lin, Taipei
The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
We know there are colours in the spectrum untranslatable to our eyes; sounds beyond the range of our hearing; sensations beyond the tolerance of taste or touch. What else is there that we might be missing? Could it be that we, ourselves, only ever really experience the mere gist of our own lives? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
— Mort W. Lumsden, Citations: A Brief Anthology
In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while i was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left
— John Knowles, A Separate Peace
I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgements must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Depressed people tended to end things on special occasions and party goers drank too much and then got behind the wheels of vehicles. But Valentine’s Day wasn’t too bad as far as suicides and car wrecks were concerned.
— Abbi Glines, Predestined
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The meaning of existence is that you have simply existed at all.
— Christopher Charles Harris
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
If you exist tomorrow as you do today, that is a miracle! It means that thousands of bad things which may happen did not happen and you are still alive! Existence is always a miracle in this universe of chaos!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.
— Philip Plait, Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...
I feel my hand. I am these two beasts struggling at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of the other paw; I feel its weight on the table which is not me. It's long, long, this impression of weight, it doesn't pass. There is no reason for it to pass. It becomes intolerable ... I draw back my hand and put it in my pocket; but immediately I feel the warmth of my thigh through the stuff. I pull my hand out of my pocket and let it hang against the back of the chair. Now I feel a weight at the end of my arm. It pulls a little, softly, insinuatingly it exists. I don't insist: no matter where I put it it will go on existing; I can't suppress it, nor can I suppress the rest of my body, the sweaty warmth, which soils my shirt, nor all this warm obesity which turns lazily, as if someone were stirring it with a spoon, nor all the sensations going on inside, going, coming, mounting from my side to my armpit or quietly vegetating from morning to night, in their usual corner.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Since then, he watched the man live his completely stifling life over and over again, one repetitive day at a time. It was so consistent that Roen even complained about the same things at the same times every day.
— Wesley Chu, The Lives of Tao
A Tibetan proverb says that it is better to live for one day as a tiger than to live for a thousand years as a sheep. Well, I think the opposite, because the most important thing is to exist! Living sheep is superior to dead tiger!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The Darkness of the black night is commencing over the white wobbling flowers at the bay of the stream whose water is sparkling and is running down from those earthly mountains to surrender into your arms full of happiness and love....It cherishes your existence and so do i do...
— AashiQi
Existence has billions of doors, but death has none!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.
— Charles Bukowski, Pulp
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.
— David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.
— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.
— Isaac Hooke, The Forever Gate 2
You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness,And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless?And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not from love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds?And is not time even as love is, undivided and spaceless?But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal
—  it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.
Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?"Joe said, "I don’t know.""Osama Bin Laden," the taxi driver said. "Because the other three don’t exist.
— Lavie Tidhar, Osama
Writing a story about a place calls that world into existence. Sometimes, as the author, you accompany it for a while. But even as you write, the characters have minds of their own.
— Alan McCluskey, Boy & Girl
Are decisions really products of analysis of a situation; or are simply out of preconceived notions? I believe, at some point of one's existence, we all are troubled by relativism!
— L.D.R.
If your existence does not make any difference, you are no more than a dead body.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Existence is more important than happiness; we can’t live without existence, but we can live with unhappiness!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In the beginning there was a fruit stand. The fruit of life on one side, and the fruit of intelligence on the other. While most chose life, humanity chose intelligence, and became the dominate species on this planet.
— J. M. Norris
Fight for your existence and when doing this, try to be just to others! You have no job other than this in this universe!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If you believe in existence, you will refuse to be a hero!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The unearthly arrogance of the nonexistence.
— Allen Ellow
Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.
— Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
The greatest truths are the simplest things in the world, simple as your own existence.
— Swami Vivekananda
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.
— Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe
without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
— Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I had a magical day during one Sunday when I walked out in nature. On the outside this day only consisted of taking a walk out in the beautiful sunny weather and cleaning my apartment, but on the inside everything suddenly changed. When I walked out in nature in the sunny weather, a silent explosion suddenly happened within me and my whole perception of reality changed. In a single moment, everything had changed, although nothing on the outside had really changed. Everything on the outside was exactly as before, but my way of seeing had changed. The difference was that before I did not see and now I could see. My eyes were open. Suddenly I was one with everything, one with the stones, one with the trees and one with the people that I meet on my walk. My heart danced with joy together with a feeling of: ”I am God”. Not that I am the creator of everything, but that I am part of the Whole, part of the divine. It felt like coming home, that Existence is my home. I also saw that even if the people that I meet did not understand that they are a part of the Whole, they still are a part of the Whole. I felt the waves of Existence in my own heart and being and I felt like a small wave in a great ocean. It gave a taste of the eternal, a taste of the limitless and boundless source of creativity. In just a few moments, I learnt more than during 20 years in university. Wisdom is basically the understanding that we all are part of the Whole. We are all small rivers moving towards the ocean. I laughed at the fact that enlightenment is really our innate birthright, and that small children already live in this mystical unity with the Whole.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Speak success into existence.
— Bianca Frazier
I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the System, if only I can manage to set eyes on it. Hitherto I have had no success; and though I have young legs, I am almost weary from running back and forth... Once or twice I have been on the verge of bending the knee. But at the last moment, when I already had my handkerchief spread on the ground, to avoid soiling my trousers, and I made a trusting appeal to one of the initiated who stood by: "Tell me now sincerely, is it entirely finished; for if so I will kneel down before it, even at the risk of ruining a pair of trousers (for on account of the heavy traffic to and from the system, the road has become quite muddy)," - I always receive the same answer: "No, it is not yet quite finished." And so there was another postponement - of the system, and of my homage. System and finality are pretty much one and the same, so much so that if the system is not finished, there is no system.
— Søren Kierkegaard
...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
Q: The Continuum didn't think you had it in you, Jean-Luc. But I knew you did...We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.Picard: When I realized the paradox.Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
— Brannon Braga, All Good Things...
How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?
— Walker Percy, The Second Coming
Somewhere beyond the pain, you turn around and realize that life is beautiful.
— T.L. Rese
If this was the true self it was marvelous and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence.
— Henry Miller
As a child I first became aware that my existence had a purpose when I realized men lusted after me. And that's why I will lust forever after men. Before I even began to worry about homework or any of those school things, I began having secret liaisons with men. And it is men who give me the proof I need now to feel I'm alive.
— Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque
We are candles, I remember thinking, and the wind is rising.
— Lynn Schooler, Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey into the Human Heart
I,' she began in her thoughts, as we all do when thinking of ourselves. But this I was her, something, someone whose life she really lived. She was this I, in body and soul, one with its very flesh, its memories, its past, present and future, all of which we seal into a single destiny each time we face ourselves and utter that tiny, unalterable word: 'I.
— Dezső Kosztolányi, Skylark
Delusions are a vital part of my existence.
— Jason Krumbine, Just Dial 911 for Assistance
....With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.
— Walker Percy
Denial is an essential part of my existence. Without it, I am nothing.
— Jason Krumbine, Just Dial 911 for Assistance
The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating… even awe-inspiring, but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
— Herbert Simon
The mystery of existence is the connection between our wins and our losses.
— George Alexiou
Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.
— Dr. Seuss
When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.
— Madeleine L'Engle
I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
All of us are products of our childhood.
— Michael  Jackson
Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.
— Pablo Neruda
Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.
— Richard Paul Evans, The Gift
Nonsense. Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older, and then before you know it, they're grown.
— J.M. Barrie
People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.
— Bryan White
The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun islike a yellow hole. . .
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?
— Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you
— Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly
My mother would say, 'Why are you always playing alone?' And I would say, 'I'm not playin', Ma. I'm fuckin' serious!
— George Carlin, Brain Droppings
Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
I want to be in fifth grade again. Now, that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy -- old enough to play outside without Mom, too young to go off the block. The perfect leash length.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.
— Robert McCammon, Boy's Life
I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it's just a small step to full-blown sociopath.
— George Carlin, Brain Droppings
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous
— John le Carré
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
. . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there's always a positive to a negative.
— Barbra Streisand
We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
— Ben Okri
Men do not quit playing because they grow old
—  they grow old because they quit playing.
I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.
— Maurice Sendak
To grow up is to wonder about things
—  to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.
Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
— Harry Truman
The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
— André Breton
I can remember staring at the orphanage and feeling envy.
— George Carlin, Brain Droppings
I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm.
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can’t go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.
— Hiromi Goto
It's funny how when you're little, you miss all the little lies. They float right past you, but you don't wonder about them much. For a long time, you think this is just something adults still do after being kids - pretend. Then one day you wake up and realize most of the world you're in is built on someone's make-believe.
— V.C. Andrews, Misty
To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Autumn Mist in a land called Honah Lee, little Jacky Paper loved that rascal Puff, and gave him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.
— Peter Yarrow, Puff, The Magic Dragon
Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.
— Robert Frost
It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
— Jean Cocteau, The Holy Terrors
Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.
— Ken Robinson
I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show.
— George Carlin, Brain Droppings
The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
— Katherine Dunn
It will be the kiss by which all others in your life will be judged... and found wanting.
— Anthony Hopkins
An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.
— Martha Grimes, The Lamorna Wink
It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .
— George Gissing
Some stories are rooted in adventure, some in strife. Others are born of the heart, and the horrors and the joys locked therein are often immeasurable, and make us truly wonder what became of those children we once were.
— David E. Hilton, Kings of Colorado
I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway.
— Morrissey, Autobiography
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
— P.D. James
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
— Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.
— Richard Bach, Nothing by Chance
A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers.One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other old before his time.One is mortal.They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins nonetheless.They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers.They each die fighting the blind god.
— Matthew Woodring Stover, Blade of Tyshalle
You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you, I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she’d have her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I’m so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are absent in childhood, our need for comfort in adulthood can be so profound that it becomes pathological, driving us to seek mothering from anyone who will have us, to use others to fill our emptiness with sex or love, and to risk becoming addicted to a perceived source of comfort.
— Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.
— Federico Fellini
Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood
— Rudyard Kipling
When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself
—  you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.
He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don't get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.
— Bella Pollen, Midnight Cactus
Well, one can't get over the habit of being a liitle girl all at once.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.
— E.L. Doctorow, World's Fair
DEAR MISS MANNERS:I a tired of being treated like a child. My father says it's because I am a child--I am twelve-and-a-half years old--but it still isn't fair. If I go into a store to buy something, nobody pays any attention to me, or if they do, it's to say, "Leave that alone," "Don't touch that," although I haven't done anything. My money is as good as anybody's, but because I am younger, they feel they can be mean to me. It happens to me at home, too. My mother's friend who comes over after dinner sometimes, who doesn't have any children of her own and doesn't know what's what, likes to say to me, "Shouldn't you be in bed by now,dear?" when she doesn't even know what my bedtime is supposed to be. Is there any way I can make these people stop?GENTLE READER:Growing up is the best revenge.
— Judith Martin
It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
— John W. Gardner
His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]
— Heather O'Neill
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.
— Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's meAnd who is the poet writing this poem?That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles
— Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
— Julian Barnes, England, England
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles
—  it was a miraculous world.
I know,” said Peter. “Perhaps better than anyone. But you can’t stay a child forever. To choose to speak into Echo’s Well is to choose illusion. To choose to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult. The real trick—the real choice—is to keep the best of the child you were, without forgetting when you grow up.“It is the best of both worlds, Jack. Being a child is to believe in magic everywhere…“…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.
— James A. Owen, The Search for the Red Dragon
The last time you were happy about nothing
—  the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?
There is no land like the land of your childhood.
— Michael Powell
Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark,and there were two of every animal inside me
— Mark Doty
I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Headcase
Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen
—  the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.
I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her. But, looking back on it now, I know that I was in love with Mrs Dempster. Not as some boys are in love with grown-up women, adoring them from afar and enjoying a fantasy life in which the older woman figures in an idealized form, but in a painful and immediate fashion; I saw her every day, I did menial tasks in her house, and I was charged to watch her and keep her from doing foolish things. Furthermore, I felt myself tied to her by the certainty that I was responsible for her straying wits, the disorder of her marriage, and the frail body of the child who was her great delight in life. I had made her what she was, and in such circumstances I must hate her or love her. In a mode that was far too demanding for my age or experience, I loved her.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.
— Stanisław Lem, Highcastle: A Remembrance
I am not my mother. I love her, but I am not her.
— Michelle Zink, Guardian of the Gate
Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.
— Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill
Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate.
— Kathy Hepinstall, Blue Asylum
Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
Soon never comes soon enough to a young child.
— Jacqueline Carey, Naamah's Blessing
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem,"Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowIs hung with bloom upon the bough.It stands among the woodland ride,Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my three-score years and ten,Twenty will not come again..."and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples.
— Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days
Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?
— Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness
It's sort of my go-to stock image of my childhood, actually. I think it has something to do with knowing I'll never be able to go back to that time that makes me cry every time I listen to it.
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts.
— Josephine Humphreys, Dreams of Sleep
This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land
My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.
— Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds
The blessedness of being little!!!
— William Shakespeare