“When the child imitates the rules practiced by his older companions he feels that he is submitting to an unalterable law”

“When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.”

“To learn by example is to submit to authority. …By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition. …Common Law …is the most important system of strictly traditional activities.”

“A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.”

“I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.”

“It was when he saw the great walls looming above him that he began to run.
He ran as though to obey an order. And this was so, though he knew nothing of it. He ran in the acknowledgement of a law as old as the laws of his home, the law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth. The law that separates the generations, that draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both.
And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.”

“Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.”

“Nafai knew the rule: when a man acts like a child, he's boyish, and everyone's delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he's childish, and everyone tells him to be a man.”

“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.”

“A man is never as big as when he is on his knees to help a child.”