“Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.”

“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.”

“Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”

“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

“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.”

“An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.”