John Knowles Quotes

Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.

I spent a good amount of my time - like a lot of guys my age - obsessing and blowing things up with G.I. Joes. I know it well.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

In my childhood I was obsessed with cameras but could not afford one. After much persuasion my father Harivansh Rai Bachchan bought me a box camera which I treasured for years. Initially I clicked trees and nature and as I grew up started noticing prettier things-motorbike, sleek cars and cool girls. But the hamartia of life is when you desire something you cannot afford it and when you are able to afford it you are too old to use it. Now I don't need all gadgets but it's satisfying to know that at least I can afford them.

One thing that's interesting is that whenever something starts, like the school year when you were a kid, it feels like such a significantly huge time in your life and how much life has changed. What's surprising is how quickly it's going by.

Years have passed and how I am anxiously watching the twilight of my childhood, quietly sinking, never to rise again.

I'm sure when I have a nostalgic, teary moment in 10 years time, I'll try to put the glasses when I was 10 on and cry to myself in front of the mirror

Didn't we, like our grandchildren, begin with a childhood we thought would never end? Now, all of a sudden, I'm older than my parents were when I thought they were old.

In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.

I'm eighty-three and homeless. It was the same when World War II ended. The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was "Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?" That what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now? I've wondered where home is. It's when I was in Indianapolis when I was nine years old. Had a dog, a cat, a brother, a sister.

I'd give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life's decay, To be once more a little child for one bright summer day.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time." "Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

I'm 48, which is a bit of a shock to me. Why only last year I thought I was a precocious young thing!

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.

It’s harder to talk about, but what I really, really, really want for Christmas is just this: I want to be 5 years old again for an hour. I want to laugh a lot and cry a lot. I want to be picked or rocked to sleep in someone’s arms, and carried up to be just one more time. I know what I really want for Christmas: I want my childhood back. People who think good thoughts give good gifts.

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

It's hard to describe to people how terrible it was when you could only watch cartoons at a certain time in your life. But no, I would watch all of them - the Warner Bros. cartoons and the Bugs Bunnys and then the Tex Avery stuff. Looking back on it, they were so incredibly subversive for their time. You'd think, "Oh, they're just making jokes and this or that." But when you watch them as an adult, you think, "Oh no, they were talking about some pretty deep stuff."

In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire.

I was ripe ten years ago. Now I’m merely preserved, and before long I’ll be buried back in the orchard with the other pits.” -Amanda to Jack

...if a man comes to his fortieth year, and has any understanding at all, he has virtually seen - thanks to their similarity - all possible happenings, both past and to come.

Reading has always been a major part of my life. It has broadened my world and taken me to places I would otherwise have never seen. Now that I am a hundred years old (this September) it still takes me to the outside world I can no longer visit.

I'm not the most sophisticated person. I'm not the smartest person in the world. But, I know what makes me excited about life, from Spielberg movies to Michael Jackson music videos to cartoons on Saturday mornings, which made my childhood.