Robin Williams Quotes

Peter was 2 years and 10 months old when we began to study him. He was afraid of a white rat, and this fear extended to a rabbit, a fur coat, a feather, cotton wool, etc., but not to wooden blocks and similar toys.

The toddler craves independence, but he fears desertion.

What I love about Goofy is the flesh on his cheeks. You can almost feel it.

I have met a couple of six-year-olds who were apparently quite excited to meet me - before they actually met me. And when they actually met me they ran behind their parents' legs and cowered for shelter.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.

The fact of the matter is that many children see. . . . Most of those who see are considered to be oddballs and every effort is made to correct them.

I've always been curious about the monster that lives under your bed. Even at 30 years old you lean over the bed to see if there's something under there, potentially.

It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignorance, attributes to the Divinity, not only the unusual effects which strike them, but moreover the most simple events, of which the causes are the most simple to understand by whomever is able to study them. In a word, man has always respected unknown causes, surprising effects that his ignorance kept him from unraveling. It was on this debris of nature that man raised the imaginary colossus of the Divinity.

There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances. 'Did he bite you?' said Father. 'No,' said Frances. 'Did he scratch you?' said Mother. 'No,' said Frances. 'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.

There is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels.

Beside Mama, in my own folding chair, with my feet sticking out in front of me, I thought about my own innards. Just a few months before I'd had no idea whether my reproductive equipment worked. There was no evidence. But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth.

The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

When the foot of the' mountain is enveloped in mist, the mountain appears to us much loftier than it is; so also when the ground and basis of a disaster is not clear to us.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

Once upon a time, this moment - this last light of the evening the day before the race - was the best moment of the year for me. The anticipation of the game to come. But that was when all I had to lose was my life.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), 'you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.' And what does IT live on?' Weak tea with cream in it.' A new difficulty came into Alice's head. 'Supposing it couldn't find any?' she suggested. Then it would die, of course.' But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully. It always happens,' said the Gnat.

People are afraid of you, Arty. Girls are terrified of you. You’re a fifteen-year-old in a bespoke suit, and nobody died.

It feels strange to me to be living in a box, hiding from the steadying influence of the moon; wearing the hide of a cow, which is supposed to be dyed to match God-knows-what, on my feet; making promises over the telephone about things I will do at a precise hour next year.

For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.

Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.

Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.