Peter Pan, James Matthew Barrie

"All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this."

"This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end."

"I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time."

"Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."

"You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."


"`I think it's perfectly sweet of you,' she declared, `and I'll get up again,' and she sat with him on the side of the bed. She also said she would give him a kiss if he liked, but Peter did not know what she meant, and he held out his hand expectantly.

`Surely you know what a kiss is?' she asked, aghast.

`I shall know when you give it to me,' he replied stiffly, and not to hurt his feeling she gave him a thimble.

`Now,' said he, `shall I give you a kiss?' and she replied with a slight primness, `If you please.' She made herself rather cheap by inclining her face toward him, but he merely dropped an acorn button into her hand, so she slowly returned her face to where it had been before, and said nicely that she would wear his kiss on the chain
around her neck. It was lucky that she did put it on that chain, for it was afterwards to save her life."

"You see children know such a lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, `I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."

"I don't want ever to be a man," he said with passion. "I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies."

"She asked where he lived.
`Second to the right,' said Peter, `and then straight on till morning.'"

"Second to the right, and straight on till morning."

"That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions."

"John said that if the worst came to the worst, all they had to do was to go straight on, for the world was round, and so in time they must come back to their own window."

"Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change."

"The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners."

"If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon. This is the nearest you ever get to it on the mainland, just one heavenly moment; if there could be two moments you might see the surf and hear the mermaids singing."

"It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, for they had long lost count of the days; but always if they wanted to do anything special they said this was Saturday night, and then they did it."

"To die would be a great adventure."

Heisenberg and the Traffic Policeman

One day Herr Doktor Heisenberg is out driving. As he rounds a curve, a policeman waves him overs. The policeman leans in the windaw and asks the famous physicist "Doktor Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg responds "No, but I do know exactly where I was!"