When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Life in Somalia before the civil war was beautiful. When the war happened, I was 8 years old and at that stage of understanding the world in a different way.
Once, when I was about eight, my mum handed me a sandwich, and I remarked: 'What are those weird things on your hands?' I was referring to the visible pores, which were such a contrast to my own alabaster-smooth skin. My mum looked mortified, while my grandma laughed and said: 'They're nothing - look at mine!'
Woman understands children better than man does, but man is more childlike than woman.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
I don't know why, but rain comes into my head the minute I think of my childhood.
and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?
Right now some future general is lying in his crib trying to get his big toe in his mouth. Such was probably the case of our guest of honor tonight.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one's mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.
I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.
I grew up in a small town in northeastern Indiana. I had an all-American childhood. And I grew up as an optimist.
I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted. I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better. I guess I was a philosophical child.
I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy.
Blame is for God and small children.
I've never been more than 9 years old.
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
When I was a kid, I lived in a poor part of Chicago, and I remember my brother and me using towels as capes. My son does it, too.
Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
The innocence of children is their wisdom, the simplicity of children is their egolessness. The freshness of the child is the freshness of your consciousness, which never becomes old, which always remains young.
Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
I have never grown up, but I will never stop growing.
There was a small boy on crutches. I do not know his name, and I suspect I never will. But I will never forget his face, his smile, his sorrow. He is one of the millions robbed of hope and dignity by charlatans discussed in this book. Wherever and whoever he is, I apologize to him for not having been able to protect him from such an experience. I humbly dedicate this book to him and to the many others who have suffered because the rest of us began caring too late.
