“Sometimes Naomi marvelled at how much [children] seemed to know, how their chatter and play landed nearly square on adult matters of love and loneliness and disappointment and joy and regret. It sometimes seemed that they came to these things with clearer eyes than adults who talked themselves out of too much.”

“He's convinced most human adults do not know how to play anymore and that playing is one of the best ways to think. Franky finds children, by far, much more pleasant and intelligent than most adults, but they are easily ruined by their families, schools, and society. He says one of the ways they are ruined is by being forced to think of all the tasks that need to be done as work, not as play. It takes the joy out of living.”

“Animation is not just for children - it's also for adults who take drugs.”

“When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.”

“When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of you. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.”

“He seemed convinced that children's questions were much more important than those of an adult. He preferred smart questions to smart answers.”

“Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”