Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

Only to youth will spring be spring.

Our children that die young are like those spring bulbs which have their flowers prepared beforehand, and leave nothing to do but to break ground, and blossom, and pass away. Thank God for spring flowers among men, as well as among the grasses of the field.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

When our memories outweigh our dreams we become old. And America is forever young.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

I breathe deeply, taking in the fresh spring air. Though Beaufort has changed and I have changed, the air itself has not. It’s still the air of my childhood, the air of my seventeenth year, and when I finally exhale, I’m fifty-seven once more. But this is okay. I smile slightly, looking towards the sky, knowing there’s one thing I haven’t told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen.

I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

Stay a child while you can be a child.

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

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

I am a child who is getting on.

Old men are children once again a dream that sways and wavers into the hard light of day.

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.

Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow into adulthood, as we can muster... And even after we're past the point of being able to play the game with any skill, if we love it, then it's like Peter Pan - we remain boys forever, we don't die.

If cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.

Ah, there are no longer any children!

The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

Ah, there are no children nowadays.

Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring.