Brian Aldiss Quotes

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

There is no child left within me, none whatsoever.

When you're young, you're always wondering when you're actually going to feel like a grownup. And I think you probably fear it, in a sense, too. There's a danger to feeling like an adult... like this whimsical kid in you is going to die or something. And then all of a sudden, one day you kind of feel like an adult and it's really nice.

Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.

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.

Adulthood it a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

When you become an adult you just make that transition and you're right... it's fun and exciting to be an adult and exciting to have independence, but once you're out from under the cover of your family's protection and love, you sort of have to take a step back and come to terms with the fact that you won't really ever have that again in the same way. You'll never be a kid again.

You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

There is a trade off - as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.

I felt different at 29 because 29, to me, is 30. There are times when I still feel like an actual toddler in a grown-up - well, semi-grown-up - body.

Unlike most other children, - especially unlike those of today - who are eager to become men and women as speedily as possible, I had a terror of growing up, which became more and more accentuated as I grew older.

You think that adulthood will hit and you'll suddenly be more capable. But that doesn't happen, ever, does it?

However light-hearted you try to be about it, the loss of youth, and everything that goes with it, is quite a trauma.

Soon the child learns that there are strangers, and ceases to be a child.

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.

When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.

I grew up overnight on that day, Dec. 27, 2007.

I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.

I never was a child.

There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.