Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
“I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm.”
Source: The Pilgrimage
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Paulo Coelho 844
Brazilian lyricist and novelist 1947Related quotes

Source: Jane Scroop (her lament for Philip Sparrow) (likely published c. 1509), Lines 17-27.

1940s, "Autobiographical Notes" (1949)
Context: A wonder of such nature I experienced as a child of 4 or 5 years, when my father showed me a compass. That this needle behaved in such a determined way did not at all fit into the nature of events, which could find a place in the unconscious world of concepts (effect connected with direct "touch"). I can still remember—or at least believe I can remember—that this experience made a deep and lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things. What man sees before him from infancy causes no reaction of this kind; he is not surprised over the falling of bodies, concerning wind and rain, nor concerning the moon or about the fact that the moon does not fall down, nor concerning the differences between living and non-living matter.
At the age of 12 I experienced a second wonder of a totally different nature: in a little book dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my hands at the beginning of a schoolyear. Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which—though by no means evident—could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me. That the axioms had to be accepted unproved did not disturb me. In any case it was quite sufficient for me if I could peg proofs upon propositions the validity of which did not seem to me to be dubious.

“My brothers and sisters all hated me 'cause I was an only child.”
"Generic Blues" http://www.yankovic.org/WeirdAl/f_Uhf_and_Other_Stuff/index.php#09, UHF soundtrack (1989) .
Song lyrics

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Source: It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect But Plenty of Sex and Drugs (2004), p. 7

“My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt.”