A Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Elizabeth Bowen

Quote Topics

Alone Away Banal Ceases Children Committed Each End Feel Grown Grown-Up Grown-Ups Intervention Justify Life Limit Never No Limit Other Present Quietly Reassuring Strange Taken Talking Terror Up Ups Violations

Quote Author

Elizabeth Bowen
Irish - Novelist
June 7, 1899 - February 22, 1973

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Elizabeth Bowen

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

Jeremy Irons

Everyone things children are sweet as Necco Wafers, but I've lived long enough to know the truth: kids are rotten. The only difference between grown-ups and kids is that grown-ups go to jail for murder. Kids get away with it.

Jennifer L. Holm

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

Jill Paton Walsh

There are many things children accept as "grown-up things" over when they have no control and for which they have no responsibility--for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents' decision to live apart.

Fred Rogers

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all.

Catherynne M. Valente

I saw my parents as model grown-ups, and their manner, their silence, informed my sense of what adulthood looked and felt like. Grown-ups behaved rationally and calmly. Grown-ups worked during the day and came home at night and sat down for drinks and passed the evening quietly.

Caroline Knapp

We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.

Warren Buffett

I have two children. They're grown children. I don't think they particularly enjoy it when I'm in a dangerous situation, but they also understand that this is something I feel strongly about. It's what I've done my whole life.

Martha Raddatz

Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away.

Craig Brown

Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.

C. S. Lewis

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.

Alison Gopnik

Only children believe they're capable of everything. They're trusting and fearless; they believe in their own power and get exactly what they want. When children grow up, they start to realize that they're not as powerful as they thought and that they need other people in order survive. Then the child begins to love and to hope his love will be requited; and as life goes on, he develops an ever-greater need to be loved in return, even if that means having to give up his power. We all end up where we are now: Grown-ups doing everything we can to be accepted and loved.

Paulo Coelho

Children know so little, they must learn quickly to imitate grown-ups whenever they feel unsure in a situation.

Francesca Marciano

I've seen mothers and children really being vulnerable in the refugee camps; it's supposed to be temporary, but they end up having children who have grown up in refugee camps.