Youthful Perception Quotes

Until one looks back on one's own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

I had always thought of Chris as my kid brother and watching how this kid, as I still thought of him, had affected so many people's lives around the world was incredible.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

Age is not a problem. It becomes a problem when people try and make us think old.

Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

Hillary Clinton was a cute, smart chick in the 1960s.

When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

I'm an 18-year-old boy, and I'm having fun. I'm just not having as much fun as people make out.

Youth has a quickness of apprehension, which it is very apt to mistake for an acuteness of penetration.

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

This is the great thing about writing for kids. Adults might not do anything if they recognized me. But if they do see me, and they're with a kid, they'll tell the kid who I am. They think they should give that to the kid. So generally that sends the kid over.

Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.

When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child

I think they look upon me as an old child, because I'm so little.

My first car was a Chevy Cavalier. My dad somehow convinced me that it was a hot sports car because it was red.

Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.

I first saw 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?' when I was very young. Its transporting qualities were so strong that I felt like I had lived it. Only recently, with adult eyes, was I able to metabolize how tragic a tale it really is.

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

A lot of times it's the child that sees something and not the grownup. I love that because, when readers get older, they start looking for the most important ideas in the story. They don't look at things in the same way anymore. Children haven't really learned to do that yet. They take all their great, intellectual skills, look at the full page, and appreciate all of the different things.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses.

Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.