CHILD

I wonder why, so often, when I walk out the door
into the world (except to go to "work" in the garden),
I am unable, or forget, to be the same easy free child
of delight, mystery, and wonder I am when I'm writing.
-Me

My music is best understood by children and animals.
- Igor Stravinsky

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated.
You can only write books that are of interest to them.
- Maurice Sendak

Only child life is real life.
- George Orwell

It takes a long time to become young.
- Pablo Picasso

I don't know who I am or who I was. I know it less
than ever. I do and I don't identify myself with
myself. Everything is totally contradictory but
maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small
boy of twelve.
- Albert Giacometti

I detest a child that is wise too soon.
- Erasmus

I decided to make a circus just for the fun of it.
- Alexander Calder

Because of my willingness to play on the surface,
the work underneath could then take place.
- Joseph Chilton Pearce

The thing is to become a master and in your old age
to acquire the courage to do what children did when
they knew nothing.
- Henry Miller

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I remember when I was very young and I saw the circus.
I thought, "How can life be like that? Can you live
that way and always pay attention to the absurd?"
I try to create my art with this in mind.
- Pat Oleszko

Genius is childhood recaptured at will.
- Charles Baudelaire

Some day you will be old enough to start reading
fairy tales again.
- C.S. Lewis

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be
instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
- George Orwell

In the lost childhood of Judas,
Christ was betrayed.
- George William Russell

Childhood decides.
- Jean Paul Sartre

If we do not keep on speaking terms with children,
we cease to be men, and become merely machines for
eating and earning money.
- John Updike

The best way to give advice to your children is to
find out what they want and advise them to do it.
- Harry Truman

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
- Virginia Woolf

Don't give a child a knife.
- Greek proverb

What can I say to you? I am perhaps the oldest musician
in the world. I am an old man, but in many senses a very
young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young
all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
- Pablo Casals

White childhood moving like a sigh
Through the green woods.
- W.H. Auden

(Click on the title of the post to go to the book
these quotes came from.)