Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Interpretation
Childhood represents a unique period of untainted joy, which is often lost as one gains knowledge and experience.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard suggests that childhood is a fleeting time characterized by innocence and pure happiness. As individuals grow older, they accumulate knowledge and experiences that can complicate their understanding of happiness, making it harder to find joy in the same way it was found during childhood.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of preserving childhood innocence in today's world.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Happiness is found in doing, not merely possessing.
O happiness! our being's end and aim! _x000D_ _x000D_ Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name: _x000D_ _x000D_ That something still which prompts the eternal sigh, _x000D_ _x000D_ For which we bear to live, or dare to die.
Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.
Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong.
The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and beginning of his life.
Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.
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