Children and young people - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

''It would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.'' And she began thinking of other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs.

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures inWonderland (1865)

I want always to be a little boy and to have fun; so I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long time among the fairies.

- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (play, 1904)

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, ''On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters'' (1923), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1970)

We are two different breeds of animals, children and adults. [. . .] There is no meeting of the minds. Jeez. There is nothing but war. It is why all children grow up hating their childhoods and searching for revenges.

- Alfred Bester, ''The Starcomber'' (1954)

Like paternal parent, like male offspring.

- Roger Dee, ''The Poundstone Paradox'' (1954)

People did not remember their childhoods clearly enough to take seriously the rages and frustrations that shook children.

- James Blish, A Case of Conscience (1958)

Homo sapiens is a unique animal. Physically he matures at approximately the age of thirteen. However, mental maturity and adjustment is often not fully realized until thirty or even more. Indeed, it is sometimes never achieved. Before such maturity is reached, our youth are susceptible to romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism, racism, the supposed glory of the military, all seem romantic to the immature. They rebel at the ordinariness of present society. They seek entertainment in excitement.

- Mack Reynolds, ''Gun for Hire'' (1960)

Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Babies are man's birthright, and it is his bounden duty to create as many of them as he possibly can.

- Robert F. Young, ''ThereWas an Old WomanWho Lived in a Shoe'' (1962)

People who say they want children later always mean they want children never.

- Bob Shaw, ''Light of Other Days'' (1966)

How fortunate for the species, Sarah muses or is mused, that children are as ingratiating as we know them. Otherwise they would soon be salted off for the leeches they are, and the race would extinguish itself in a fair sweet flowering, the last generations' massive achievement in the arts and pursuits of high civilization.

- Pamela Zoline, ''The Heat Death of the Universe'' (1967)

When a species becomes terrified of its own young, it appears to be scheduled for the grand disposall down which went the dinosaurs.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

The young are an alien species. They won't replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence.

- William S. Burroughs, TheWild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971)

These kids, that I have known, lived with, still know, in California, are my science fiction stories of tomorrow, my summation, at this point of my life as a person and a writer; they are what I look ahead to - and so keenly desire to see prevail.What, more than anything else I have ever encountered, I believe in. And would give my life for. My full measure of devotion, in this war we are fighting, to maintain, and augment, what is human about us, what is the core of ourselves, and the source of our destiny.

- Philip K. Dick, ''The Android and the Human'' (1972)

''Do they expect students not to be anarchists?'' he said. ''What else can the young be?''

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

Kids don't get invited to the events that make history. Until very recently all they ever did was work.Worked until they grew old or worked until they starved or worked until they were killed by a passing war.

- P. J. Plauger, ''Child of All Ages'' (1975)

''Of course growing up,'' I said. ''Rae is one more year away from being a child.What is so hard to understand about that?'' Hawk landed at last upon a lonely beach. ''One more year away from being a child? That does not sound like growing!''

- Richard Bach, There's No Such Place as Far Away (1979)

Kids are bent. They think around corners. But starting at roughly age eight, when childhood's second great era begins, the kinks begin to straighten out, 49 Children and Young People one by one. The boundaries of thought and vision begin to close down to a tunnel as we gear up to get along. [. . .] The job of the fantasy-horror writer is to make you, for a little while, a child again.

- Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1981)

There is something enormously powerful in the child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain.

- Philip K. Dick, ''How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later'' (1985)

Children aren't pets - they're little animals that have to be watched as well as loved.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Youth is stupidly resilient.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

''A child is a kind of immortality,'' Selna muttered. ''A link forged. A bond.''

- Jane Yolen, ''TheWhite Babe'' (1987)

It is always, somehow, a surprise to find that an adult child still loves you.

- Nancy Kress, ''In Memoriam'' (1988)

A boy's heart is a natural altar and many strange deities ask for sacrifice there.

- Jane Yolen, ''The Quiet Monk'' (1988)

I was old the day I was born and I'll be young the day I die.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (1994)