“Fermat was my childhood passion.”

“A man's passion for the mountain is, above all, his childhood which refuses to die.”

“I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.”

“My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.”

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

“It was a passion from my childhood to work for children, I carried it forward. I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.”

“I never stole in my childhood, so there was no question of apologising to my father.”

“God’s purpose for my life was that I have a passion for God’s glory and that I have a passion for my joy in that glory, and that these two are one passion.”

“I had a happy, idyllic, old-fashioned childhood. Go to the town where I spent that childhood, you will not find my happy hours there. Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God.”

“My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of half century.”