{"quotes":[{"text":"Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":11922,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.","author":"Sol Luckman","tags":["adolescence","adulthood","boy","boyhood","coming-of-age","crossroads","deception","growing-up","illusion","lies","maturation","rite-of-passage","summer","teen","teenager"],"id":22418,"author_id":"Sol+Luckman"},{"text":"Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.","author":"Mark Twain","tags":["adventure","american","boyhood","sawyer","tom"],"id":78184,"author_id":"Mark+Twain"},{"text":"Where his boyhood retreat had been a cave hewn for one, it now accommodated two. He was suddenly two and it amazed and delighted, causing a stir in the pit of him, a kind of fibrillation.","author":"Emma Richler","tags":["be-my-wolff","boyhood","childhood","companionship","duo","emma-richler","partner","siblings"],"id":80081,"author_id":"Emma+Richler"},{"text":"I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and -lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim’s got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he’s richer?","author":"Ray Bradbury","tags":["boyhood","richness","wealth"],"id":83816,"author_id":"Ray+Bradbury"},{"text":"The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.","author":"William Henry Hudson","tags":["boyhood","british-people","discipline","growing-up","restraint","suppressing-emotions"],"id":86771,"author_id":"William+Henry+Hudson"},{"text":"Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. Your life?","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":95133,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"At some point, you're no longer growing up, you're aging. But no one can pinpoint that moment exactly.","author":"Richard Linklater","tags":["aging","boyhood","growing-up","life"],"id":106037,"author_id":"Richard+Linklater"},{"text":"Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things.","author":"Laurie Lee","tags":["beauty","beauty-in-nature","boyhood","childhood-memories","cider-with-rosie","countryside","landscape","laurie-lee","nature","pastoral"],"id":152308,"author_id":"Laurie+Lee"},{"text":"I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.","author":"Donald Miller","tags":["boyhood","fatherhood","fear","love"],"id":232648,"author_id":"Donald+Miller"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":22,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}