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"I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I'm afraid of those cows,' protested poor Dora, seeing a prospect of escape.'The very idea of your being scared of those cows,' scoffed Davy. 'Why, they're both younger than you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And on some level it walways felt like kids paying at being grown."
Author Name
Personal Development
"While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When I was about ten, I was very impressed by the way Tarzan could swing through the trees from vine to vine. No one ever told me, 'Don't try this at home.'"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves."
Author Name
Personal Development
"For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us."
Education
"Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset."
Heart
"My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it."
Family
"I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself."
Memory
"Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more."
Nothing
"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it."
Needs
"The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him."
Work
"All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe."
Family
"I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers."
War
"A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not."
Fear
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