I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it’s hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.

who cares how you spend your weekend let your inner child enjoy the break from being a Pretentious and stressed adult.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

Source: Brian Wilson Aldiss, Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977).

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When I was a kid I wanted to be older… This shit was not what I expected.

Not to grow up properly is to retain our ‘caterpillar’ quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don’t grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child’s brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

Source: Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998).