Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.
James M. BarrieRead
All children, except one, grow up.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that while all children age and mature, there is one child who maintains a sense of eternal youth.
James M. Barrie's quote highlights the inevitable process of growing up that all children experience, except for one β Peter Pan, who symbolizes the desire to remain a child forever. This notion reflects the bittersweet nature of growing up, where innocence and imagination often get replaced by responsibilities and the harsh realities of adulthood.
Themes
ChildrenGrowthYouthImaginationAdulthood
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a speech about the importance of cherishing childhood.
More from James M. Barrie
All quotes βHis lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall.
James M. BarrieRead
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
James M. BarrieRead
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
James M. BarrieRead
It was then that Hook bit him. Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.
James M. BarrieRead
But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.
James M. BarrieRead
Similar quotes
In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.
Rabih AlameddineRead
In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.
Hippolyte TaineRead
She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.
Jack KerouacRead
My dad had this incredible kindness that oozed through every part of his body. He had the ability to look at life positively in spite of what he went through. He was a Holocaust survivor. When he was 15-1/2 years old, he was liberated from the Dachau Concentration Camp by American soldiers who risked a lot to save people they had never met.
Daniel LubetzkyRead
I was shy for several years in my early days in Hollywood until I figured out that no one really gave a damn if I was shy or not, and I got over my shyness.
Lucille BallRead
Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.
Caroline KnappRead