Kent Haruf Quotes

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

The really best acting is children in a playground or in a backyard. They're just lost in their imagination. The backyard isn't a pirate ship or a jungle, in the same way that the soundstage isn't Shambala.

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

I'm seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There's no black and white to it. But sometimes I'm seeing it like I'm 4.

The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging.

All this stuff is so mind-blowing to me that I get to do in my life. Throwing the first pitch out at the White Sox game on a random Wednesday? Like who am I? How did I get this life? I'm glad I'm not jaded, and little kids are the least jaded people in the entire world, so it's fun to be around people that still find wonder in how cool things are.

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

She has the heart of a child, you know. Yeah, it's in a box beside her bed. - Kaia Skyhawk

What are so mysterious as the eyes of a child?

Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.

Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up.

I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better.

...and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.

The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome.

Children ask better questions than adults. "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" "Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your lawyer?"

The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

Innocence has nothing to dread.

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.

The world was so beautiful when regarded like this, without searching, so simply, in such a childlike way. Moons and stas were beautiful, beautiful were bank and stream, forest and rocks, goat and gold-bug, flower and butterfly. So lovely, so delightful to go through the world this way, so like a child, awake, open to what is near, without distrust.

Unless we can be like children, we can't be happy.