And because it starts that way, it is more likely to continue that way. And therein resides the true difference between an Adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a Mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped.

difference between a child and an adult is not years, rather it’s a willingness to accept responsibility, to be responsible for one’s own actions.

The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning.

Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy.

Young men most needed experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a general rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles had better be left aside; values were enough.

when you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it.

The resurrection is to be like a child, but with a difference. The difference is that we have freedom with wisdom instead of innocence.

We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with.

The thing that is maybe the real difference, the fundamental difference, is that in adult literature you can have a literature of despair and end the work without any hope; you can have a literature of the absurd in which life is pointless, meaningless...In children's literature you can have a tragic ending...nevertheless, maybe what happens makes some kind of sense; maybe there is hope. We have got to pull out of ourselves some kind of hope. This is the key difference between writing for adults and children.

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.

"But they're not really paper dolls," Melanie said. "And I don't really play with them, not like moving them around and dressing them up and everything. They're just sort of a record of a game I play. I make up a family and then I find people who look like them in magazines and catalogues, just so I'll remember them better."

It crossed his mind that maybe one of the most telling differences between the young and the old lay in this detail. As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.

I have found that — just as in real life — imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.