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 world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.
If you caught your kid raising cats in tiny boxes, forcing them to live in their own feces without clean air or sunlight, pulling their teeth and claws out with pliers to keep them from hurting each other…you’d rush him to a psychiatrist. But you support that very behavior every time you buy meat, eggs, dairy or fur.
The quality of life is more important than life itself.
...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection
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