Alice Meynell Quotes

Reading 'IT' again as an adult, you understand it from a different perspective. It is basically a love letter to childhood and talks about all of the treasures of that time, like imagination and belief, that are inevitably lost in adulthood.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

A home is a place in time. And no place stays the same after you finally grow up and leave it. No place can ever change as much as the person who grows up there.

Every time I play 'Part of Your World,' a whole part of my life comes back to me. It's just inescapable - it was an innocent time, and a sense of discovery that we were all involved with.

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

I think you get to a certain point in your life and where you grew up stops reminding you of when you grew up. Everything changes, everything metamorphosizes.

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.

I was amazed at the house that I grew up in; it looks practically identical to the way it was, but I couldn't recognize it because of the size of the trees.

When I reflect on how things have changed, I can't help but laugh.

What's interesting to me is the distinction between my old life and my present life.

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

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Nature abhors a virgin - a frozen asset.

I don't think I've changed since I was a little kid.

We learn many things from children, always.

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

Childhood is but change made gay and visible.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

Time is never time at all. You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth. And our lives are forever changed. We will never be the same. The more you change, the less you feel.

How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

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