Margaret Halsey Quotes

Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

It's such a potent thing, to be a kid. We grow up, and we don't want to remember how everything is so beautiful and terrifying when we're young. The older you get, the more you hope to muffle things.

When I get back on snow, it's almost like I travel back in time to that feeling I used to have. That youthful, 6-year-old, 'nothing else matters,' 'you're sort of the center of the universe' kind of a feeling.

The happiest moment was when I just played with a ball as a boy, carefree, without worrying about anything.

I still feel childlike. Not childish - there's a difference. But to be childlike is to be savoured and treasured. I offer my books to those who like the things of childhood; the challenges, intrigue, joy and fun.

The best thing about candy is that it can't be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise.

Everybody's twelve years old in an apple orchard.

Living is about clucking your tongue and enjoying the sound. ~Slater

To be young was very heaven!

I don't know that I've ever felt as happy as I did that day, but then again, it was always like that when we were together. I never wanted it to end.

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.

You can remember times when you were a kid, when life looked too doggoned deliciously beautiful to be left alone. So you could feel like that again if you worked at it.

My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.

I feel like writing about a time when I was probably, and think all of us are, the happiest before the obligations start in.

Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

Take delight in a thing, or rather in anything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is. A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer lawn, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe.