I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face.
Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.
Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize t...
To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't li...
It costs about the same to house a maximum-security young adult prisoner for a year as it does to send his law-abiding counterpart to Harvard.
I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.
I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.
A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two. Two is enough. Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right. Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.
A good teacher does not teach all that he knows. He teaches all that the learners need to know at the time, and all that the learners can accountably learn in the time given.
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily b...
To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.
I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.
I always say to myself that if I can make a movie that makes a kid smile or gives them some hope or something to get excited about, then I'm applying myself in the best way that I can. I don't think that just goes for kids. I think that it goes for a...
What i realise now is that the story actually did have a happy ending: the children came back. In spite of everything the adults did to them, the children found their own way home, their pockets full of precious stones and pearls that gleamed and sho...
I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing thing...
Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenc...
I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adul...
Children nurtured in kindness learn the value of understanding. Children taught to be self-sufficient, to respect others, to value education and to build life up rather than to tear it down will become adults capable of leading us to a brighter futur...
My next memory is of waking up, it then being dark outside, and my brother and sister fast asleep on the couch. Sitting up I sensed something was broken. Maybe the night? It was open and alive with lights and noises and worried voices. The adults wer...
Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in...
Kerri and I met at theatre camp when were 16 years old, which is pretty lame. The rest of us met when we founded the State at New York University in 1988. Most of our adult lives have been spent bickering with these people.
