“One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”

— Randall Jarrell

"An Unread Book," introduction to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Holt, Rinehart, 1965 edition)
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Randall Jarrell215

poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book’, pp. 51–52
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.”

Henning Mankell (1948–2015) Swedish crime writer, children's author, leftist activist and dramatist

Source: When the Snow Fell

“Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 17e

“Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
Context: Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.”

David Sedaris book Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

Source: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

“In the child, we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, March 1, 1946, after Goldensohn asks Ohlendorf, "How did you figure a six month old Jewish infant must be killed - was it an enemy? Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.