Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Children know something that most people have forgotten.

Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well, I won't do that.

To wonder about life is not something we learn; it is something we forget.

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

If you look at little kids and wild animals, these are two groups of things that whenever I'm with them forces me to be in the moment.

I think because I'm not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.

I don't ever want to grow up. That's boring.

Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him what he was going to be when he grew up. Of course I expected to hear him say a sailor, a soldier, a hunter, or something else that seems heroic to childhood, and I was very much surprised when he answered innocently, 'A man.'

I adore kids. I enjoy everything that they bring to the party. They just say what they think.

You can't fool children.

We learn many things from children, always.

Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.

Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible.

Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

Is not Jesus pointing to children even as models for grownups?

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

A small child has no ambitions, he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment - a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky... and he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars... Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure.

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.

Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.

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.

Miracles are happening every day. I do think that's true. If you can take the time to look. It took me a while to learn that, though some children know it instinctively and they do have wonder when they are kids. But the trouble is, as we grow older, we lose it.

It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.

Miss the present and you live in boredom. BE in the present and you will be surprised that there is no boredom at all. Start by looking around a little more like a child. Be a child again! That's what meditation is all about: being a child again - a rebirth, being innocent again, not-knowing.

They (children) are my teachers. I watch them and I learn. It is important for us to try and be like them and imitate them. They are golden.