The child in time-Ian McEvan

The manic side, the energetic, successful side was public, and the rest, the mad lows, was all for me.

Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

There is no reason on earth why a well-behaved child should not have an ulterior motive.

Children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

The way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what they wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

Past a certain age, men frozen into place; they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes around in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say "When I grow up", there is always an edge of disbelief-how could they ever be other than what they are?

Time present and time past are both perhaps present in the future, and time future contained in the past.

It was not always the case that a large minority compromising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behavior and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.