“Fold it up and put it away.”
Not verified. The apparent source is this op-ed in the Roanoke Times http://www.roanoke.com/opinion/commentary/cox-honoring-lee-anew/article_08d2e9a7-f33b-577d-9b55-2caf94a5083e.html|, dated 14 July 2014, by David Cox (who was rector of R. E. Lee Memorial (Episcopal) Church in Lexington from 1987-2000):
"Someone wrote me of a woman asking Lee what to do with an old battle flag. Lee supposedly responded, 'Fold it up and put it away.' Though I’ve not verified the account, it is consistent with his letters and acts of his last years. He was always looking ahead."
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Robert E. Lee 55
Confederate general in the Civil War 1807–1870Related quotes
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"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.