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.
Interpretation
Childhood is a magical time filled with awe and wonder, which diminishes as we grow older.
Eugene Ionesco's quote reflects on the extraordinary perspective of childhood, when everything seems fresh and miraculous. As we age, this sense of wonder fades, marking the end of childhood as the point where we become less surprised and amazed by the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder as we grow older.
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.
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.
Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.
There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.
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