Stephen Sondheim Quotes

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

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.

I feel it was just a few years ago I was running around in short pants.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Inside every adult there's still a child that lingers.

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

I love kids. I was a kid myself, once.

I never want to grow up.

In reality, I never want to grow up.

I just like being a kid. I enjoy it, I don't want to grow up.

I've never been more than 9 years old.

I suppose you always look back at how easier things were being young. There's always a shame that you're not as naive as you were.

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.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

The difference between the child and the man lies chiefly in the unlimited confidence and buoyancy of youth.

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

Do you hear the children singing?

Everybody's twelve years old in an apple orchard.

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.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Be a child again. Flirt. Giggle. Dip your cookies in your milk. Take a nap. Say you're sorry if you hurt someone. Chase a butterfly. Be a child again.

My family joke that I'm really a very senior person who accidentally happens to be 11.

I envy my daughter's childhood.

For me, baseball just brings up a lot of nostalgic, happy feelings because I enjoyed it as a kid, and I liked being out there playing in the sun, and it was a simpler time for all of us.

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