Maia Szalavitz:

It turns out that exerting self-control can make you happier not only in the long run, but also in the moment. Those who showed the greatest self-control reported more good moods and fewer bad ones. But this didn't appear to linked to being more able to resist temptations -- it was because they exposed themselves to fewer situations that might evoke craving in the first place. They were, in essence, setting themselves up to be happy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

When you have your own money, your own wheels, and the full ownership of your legs, your need for such imagination, or maybe your opportunity to exercise it, is reduced. The older I get, the more I treasure the sprawling periods of incomprehension, the not knowing, the lands beyond Google, the places in which you must be immersed to comprehend.

Marina Petrova:

At the age of eight ... the certainty of my future non-being was deeply unsettling.

Richard Friedman:

When, as an adult, you look back at your childhood experiences, they appear to unfold in slow motion probably because the sheer number of them gives you the impression that they must have taken forever to acquire. So when you recall the summer vacation when you first learned to swim or row a boat, it feels endless.

But this is merely an illusion, the way adults understand the past when they look through the telescope of lost time. This, though, is not an illusion: almost all of us faced far steeper learning curves when we were young. Most adults do not explore and learn about the world the way they did when they were young; adult life lacks the constant discovery and endless novelty of childhood.