Johan Huizinga Quotes

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed.

On paper, it looks rough, but I had a great childhood.

The things I tend to do best are the things that are the most overtly emotional, whether it's sentimental or whether it's celebratory or whether it's conflicted.

It's a different world: when I'm writing 'Toast,' I've got one foot in 1974 and one foot in the modern day, because the modern day is nowhere near as funny or interesting.

I am so homesick every day of the week.

I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain, and looking out to sea, in hopes of seeing a ship : then fancy that, at a vast distance, I spied a sail, please myself with the hopes of it, and, after looking steadily, till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by my folly.

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born

The things which the child loves remain in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves. I am one of those who remembers those places regardless of distance or time.

It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?

What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

Next to the highest peak of happiness, there’s the deepest gap of pain.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

I watched them from the window, thy children at their play, And I thought of all my own dear friends, who were far, oh, far away, And childish loves, and childish cares, and a child's own buoyant gladness Came gushing back again to me with a soft and solemn sadness; And feelings frozen up full long, and thoughts of long ago, Seemed to be thawing at my heart with a warm and sudden flow.

It's very hard to be objective about something you're in, especially when you set it up against things that you experienced as a child.

I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.

For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.

Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

The past is another planet.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.