Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.
Interpretation
Childhood ends when wonder and amazement fade from our lives.
This quote by Eugene Ionesco suggests that the essence of childhood is rooted in the ability to find awe and wonder in the world around us. As we grow older and become accustomed to our environments, we often lose that innate curiosity and ability to be astonished, marking a significant transition from the innocence and exploration of childhood to the familiarity and pragmatism of adulthood.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of creativity in education, one might say, 'As Eugene Ionesco said, childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.'
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.
Everything lives and lasts by the inner necessity of its being, by its own nature's need.
...Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.
Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?
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