Peter Shaffer Quotes

Every child begins the world again.

If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed -- and who try to make slaves of all of us -- and they have their music and we have ours.

We all know how to be a child.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

In most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.

Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

Animals, children, and the working class comprise the company in which I'll feel most at ease.

Sorrow makes us all children again.

Every time a child, any child, is born, it is new - and different; that is the wonder.

I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who's like a child.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

Children are the best living audience in the world because they are so thoroughly honest.

In just - Spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee

I find children inspiring. The way they look at the world. The magical world they live in, to me, is inspiring.

They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling on its own, a prime movement, a sacred Yes.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Everybody's twelve years old in an apple orchard.

See the world as if for the first time; see it through the eyes of a child, and you will suddenly find that you are free.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

MOTHER: Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day. JIM: I'm never going to own anything that can hurt me.

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.