The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
Interpretation
Childhood is characterized by wonder and amazement, which fades as we grow up and become accustomed to life.
This quote by Eugene Ionesco reflects on the transition from childhood to adulthood, suggesting that the end of childhood is marked by a loss of astonishment and novelty in the world around us. As we mature, the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the sense of wonder that defines childhood is replaced by familiarity and acceptance of existence, indicating a significant shift in perspective and experience.
In practice
In a speech about retaining childlike wonder as we age.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established "religion" (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one's "personal Lord and Savior" . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.
Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.
We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.