“You know, it’s pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don’t know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive – no viruses, no bad information, no crap that’s been downloaded into it yet. It’s what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case “head drive” that starts the corruption of the files.”

“And so seated next to my father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case off the floor and set it on the floor.Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.It’s too heavy,” I said.Yes,” he said, “and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”

“Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, “We *told* you not to tell.” But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.”

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“Healing old hurts can only begin when the children we once were feel safe enough to speak their hearts to the adults we are now.”

“The Dream I Dream For You, My Child…I hope you search for four-leaf clovers,grin back at Cheshire moons,breathe in the springtime breezes,and dance with summer loons.I hope you gaze in wide-eyed wonderat the buzzing fireflyand rest beneath the sunlit treesas butterflies fly by.I hope you gather simple treasuresof pebbles, twigs, and leavesand marvel at the fragile webthe tiny spider weaves.I hope you read poetry and fairy talesand sing silly, made-up songs,and pretend to be a superherorighting this world’s wrongs.I hope your days are filled with magicand your nights with happy dreams,and you grow up knowing that happiness is found in simple things.The dream I dream for you, my child,as you discover, learn, and grow,is that you find these simple joyswherever in life you go.”

“We were full of dreams and it was with impatient hearts that we imagined the joys and adventures life held in store for us.”

“She felt very old and mature and wise—which showed how young she was. She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now—the glory and the dream?”

“When you grow up, you don’t lose happiness, you just pass it on to the next generation.”

“Seeing the person yeu love come homeHappiness is so simple to a child”

“Benar. Kita tak pernah lagi menjumpai kebahagiaan yang setara dengan kebahagiaan masa kanak-kanak kita.” Pablo mengangguk sedih.”

“No child should ever be too sad to play.”

“One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.”

“Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.”

“If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.”