“It was at this time that people found along the roads and highways little children, tiny vagabonds who refused to grow up. Little girls of seven years knelt and prayed that they might not grow older, for puberty seemed to them a sign of mortality.”

“May your course not run from one end to the other; for such a course does not exist; but may every step you take mark a redressed projection.With your left foot you shall wipe out the footprint of your right foot.”

“It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.”

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”

“Nor did these society people add to Elstir's work in their mind's eye that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or at least to look without discomfort at, Chardin's painting. And yet the older among them might have reminded themselves that in the course of their lives they had gradually seen, as the years bore them away from it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by Ingres and what they had supposed must forever remain a "horror" (Manet's Olympia, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed like twins. But we never learn, because we lack the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be faced with an experience which has no precedents in the past.”

“I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.”

“Very few people grow up. Most people grow older but growing up is challenging. Many people get older honor their credit cards matriculate into and graduate out of schools get married and have children. They call that growing up maturing. It's not. It is simply growing old - Maya Angelo”