"I suppose one could scarcely have had innocence and experience. Being young is very exhausting and… — John Wyndham

"I guess——" she said, wistfully—"I guess the only thing that's wrong with children is that they grow up to be people like you."

Sooner or later the amateur always overreaches himself.

It was so absurd to die at sixty, anyway, and, as he saw it, it would be even more wasteful to die at eighty. A scheme of things in which the wisdom acquired in living was simply scrapped in this way was, to say the least, grossly inefficient. What did it mean? That somebody else would have to go through the process of learning all that life had already taken sixty years to teach him; and then be similarly scrapped in the end. No wonder the race was slow in getting anywhere—if, indeed, it were getting anywhere—with this cat-and-mouse, ten-forward-and-nine-back system.