The seven ages

A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645)

What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember … By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.
Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), The Mill- stone, 1965

I am fond of children (except boys).
Lewis Carroll in a letter to Kathleen Eschwege, 1879

It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.
Alexandre