Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.

Physical growth is a function of time. No two-year-old child has ever been six feet tall. Intellectual growth is a function of learning. Spiritual growth is neither a function of time or learning, but it is a function of obedience.

Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

It's, like, weird to watch a human being develop.

When I was a child, I acted like child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The most sophisticated people I've ever known had just one thing in common: they were all in touch with their inner children.

I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

When you're physically growing up, you develop emotionally with that.

We're naturally programmed to endure a muddle of emotions as we leave childhood behind.

There is no child left within me, none whatsoever.

I wondered to what extent people remained the same as they'd been when very young; if one peeled back the layers of living one would come to the know child.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

I think there's nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there's a disease in not growing up.

I have a theory that there are still parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age of between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up.

I was indeed very slow as a youngster.

I have matured a lot.

I have always said that I cannot allow the child within me to die. It's kept me alive.

Kids are generally rotten until the age of about six, when they become people.

I was always quite mature as a child and as I get older I'm regressing.

To become historically-minded is to be grown-up.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

You understand people better if you look at them-no matter how old or impressive or important they may be-as if they were children. For most men never mature; they simply grow taller.