A Quote by Maurice Sendak
In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.
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Anger cannot be destroyed by anger and cruelty by cruelty.
I think that others can drive a creature to naughtiness, always accusing and blaming them. After a while it must make the creature unhappy and drive him...to be naughty, because nobody expects them to be good.
95 percent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 percent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.
Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.
The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.
In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.
To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.
Crazy people who are productive are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are eccentric. Crazy people who are neither productive nor rich are just plain crazy. Geniuses and crazy people are both out in the middle of a deep ocean; geniuses swim, crazy people drown. Most of us are sitting safely on the shore. Take a chance and get your feet wet.
When anger is not trampling roughshod through our nervous system, it is sitting sullenly in some unspecified internal organ. "She's got a lot of anger in her," people will say (it nestles, presumably, somewhere in the gut), or, "He's a deeply angry man" (as opposed, presumably, to a superficially angry one). If anger isn't released, it "turns inward" and metamorphoses into another creature altogether.
The child says, "Well geesh, the institutions that I'm supposed to respect - the church and the government - they're telling me things that don't appear to be true. Either I'm crazy or they're crazy." That creates the Absurd Child. The Absurd Child is one who says, "Well, I think they're crazy." So you live in this state of alienation from your culture and your society and your family because you see this rampant bullshit around you.
People talk about fantastic memories of childhood, but I remember children being cruel to me and wanting to come out of childhood as soon as possible because I knew adults were generally more contained in their cruelty.
Wherever there is injustice, there is anger, and anger is like gasoline - if you spray it around and somebody lights a matchstick, you have an inferno. But anger inside an engine is powerful: it can drive us forward and can get us through dreadful moments and give us power. I learnt this with my discussions with nuclear policy makers.
My complaint is that Americans drive me crazy, and the politics drive me crazy.
Anger is like gasoline. If you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. [But] if we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward.
For 'Drive,' we needed the songs to dictate emotions and really bring you into the mind of The Driver; he's a unique and complicated guy, so the music itself had to be unique and complicated.
A child is a child in any country, whatever the politics. Let's get down to basics. That's what a child forces you to do. Nothing else much matters, there is no complicated diplomacy, when a child is starving. It's simple. And we'd better do something about it. For our sakes, too. That is, if we want to continue to call ourselves human.
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