Travis McGee series, A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972)
Context: We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won't catch on. Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the the flaw...
The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed — on the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.
Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy, mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever."
“Children like to work, and are always eager to imitate the work of adults.”
Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century, 1913, Ch. 5.
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Georgi Plekhanov 3
Russian revolutionary 1856–1918Related quotes
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Speaking at Women's march in Los Angeles (21 January 2017).
“Adults must remember that they look like insane giants to children.”
Attributed without citation in Isabella Fiske McFarlin, et al., "Free The Kids! and Quarry Hill Community" http://search.proquest.com/openview/e76b1d1a966283049dcf60bcb9386c4d/1, Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. 21 No. 1 (Summer 1993), p. 21
“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”
“I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
“Is adult entertainment killing our children? Or is killing our children entertaining adults?”
As quoted in MarilynManson.com (2000).
2000s