Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

On the river path in Boston beauty was most expressed as youth and intelligence. That made sense; sixty degree-giving institutions, some three hundred thousand students; that meant at least one hundred fifty thousand more nubile young women than demographics would ordinarily suggest. Maybe that was why young men stayed in Boston when their college years were over, maybe that explained why they were so intellectually hyperactive, so frustrated, so alcoholic, such terrible drivers.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.