“Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science. Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.”
Albert Einstein
“A white person and a black person in today's New York City can agree over coffee that race is `all in your mind, but when they leave Starbucks and raise their hands to hail a taxi, the white person is more likely to get a cab. In that moment, race is as real as gravity.”
David Berreby
“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”
Ben Okri
“So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.”
Gaston Bachelard
“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!”
Charles Dickens
“The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.”
Alice Miller
“She leaves us all a better America than the America of her childhood.”
Oprah Winfrey
