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"Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question."
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"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?"

"When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels."

"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."

"Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead."

"The fundamental emotional need of every child is being-with."
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"There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help."


"It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth."


"True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded."


"I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something."


"The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world."


"Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others."


"It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all."


"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened."
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