“She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.”

“If children could, if adults knew.”

“Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.”

“Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.”

“In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults. ”

“But even as she calls adult reality unreal, Alice, as the most reasonable creature in her unreasonable dreams, doesn’t quite yet realize that the adult’s sense of reality has already taken up residence in her. The principal dream of most children—the dream within the dream, as it were—is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult, the outlook is reversed. The adult’s quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms—and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult”