Dennis Potter Quotes

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

I think that inside every adult is the heart of a child. We just gradually convince ourselves that we have to act more like adults.

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.

It's interesting how things you hear as a kid take on a whole new meaning when you are an adult.

Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - my youth.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

At 19, you know everything; by the time you're 40, you haven't got a clue.

I definitely want to grow intelligently, but I do want to stay a kid forever!

Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense.

Get this in mind early: We never grow up.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

When you're in an industry where you're forced to grow up so quickly, part of you never grows up, and that's a good thing.

What teens will realize is always a mystery to me. I'm still realizing so many things myself, very belatedly, that it seems unwise to think I have any right to be showing people things in hopes that they'll realize them.

At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

As you age, you have this vast cauldron of experience to draw from. Some of the experiences are great; some of them you wish you'd never had. But all of them shape the work that you do and the person you become. It's just inevitable.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.