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Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”

Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Author

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American physician, poet, and writer who made significant contributions to the field of medicine and influenced American literature and culture. He was a pioneer in the use of ether as an anesthetic and a leading figure in the medical community of his time. more

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“The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.”

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“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”

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“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”

Book:Through the Garden Gate

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“You are the ruler of my heart. There is no measure greater than this.”

Love Believe Soul Happiness Romance Joy Faith Karma Soul Mate Twin Flames Kindred Spirits Karmic Sated Truth Devour Wantin

Book:Unrequited

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“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.”

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“That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.”

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“Wherever you turn, you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart. It seems that everyone has their own and each is totally different. My brother’s childhood is very noisy, for example, while mine is quiet and furtive and watchful. No one likes it and no one has any use for it.”

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