"The Man With The Golden Key": Quotations

"In other words; I have never lost the sense that [childhood] was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living. It seems to me that when I came out of the house and stood on that hill of houses, where the roofs sank steeply towards Holland Park, and terraces of new red houses could look out across a vast hollow and see far away the sparkle of the Crystal Palace (and seeing it was a juvenile sport in those parts), I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man that afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it with self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending, and it is he who has his head in a cloud."

--from The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, 1936.