Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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.

There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.

Because I am still a little girl who believes in Santa and the tooth fairy and you.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.

No adult can bear a child’s burden or grow up in his stead.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.

Philosophy has forgotten about children

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted. I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better. I guess I was a philosophical child.

So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence.

Your little child is the only true democrat.

children are not undeveloped versions of adult people: they are a different race of beings: they are children.

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world

The protected place in space and time that we once called childhood has grown shorter.

I'm the only one who still believes in Santa Claus!