“Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”

“In Dallie's mind that was one of the world's stupidest questions, right up there with: was it as good for you as it was for me?”

“The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.”

“The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect--but, nearly invariably, the stupidest. ”

“Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.”

“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.”