"A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back"
About this Quote
Leave it to Arthur Miller to turn pursuit into a kind of moral failure. The line opens with a deliberately knotty image - "a child's spirit is like a child" - a tautology that feels almost impatient, as if Miller is waving away adult overthinking. You already know how children move: not in straight lines, not on command, not in response to pressure. So why do we keep trying to manage the invisible parts of them with the blunt tools of authority?
The intent is less sentimental than it looks. Miller is warning against the adult reflex to chase outcomes: obedience, gratitude, resilience, success. "Running after it" reads like parenting as enforcement, or even as anxiety dressed up as care. The subtext is that the chase is not neutral; it turns the child into quarry and the adult into hunter, and in that switch the "spirit" - autonomy, trust, play, candor - goes evasive. Standing still isn't passivity. It's restraint, a choice to stop performing control.
"For love" is the hinge. Miller isn't proposing a technique so much as a posture: making yourself a safe place rather than an extracting force. The spirit "come[s] back" only if it believes it won't be captured and reprogrammed.
Context matters: Miller wrote in a century that industrialized childhood - schools, tests, social scripts, Cold War conformity - while his plays obsessed over what happens when people are valued for output instead of inner life. This line is a small rebellion against that economy: if you want the real child, stop chasing the version that makes you look like a successful adult.
The intent is less sentimental than it looks. Miller is warning against the adult reflex to chase outcomes: obedience, gratitude, resilience, success. "Running after it" reads like parenting as enforcement, or even as anxiety dressed up as care. The subtext is that the chase is not neutral; it turns the child into quarry and the adult into hunter, and in that switch the "spirit" - autonomy, trust, play, candor - goes evasive. Standing still isn't passivity. It's restraint, a choice to stop performing control.
"For love" is the hinge. Miller isn't proposing a technique so much as a posture: making yourself a safe place rather than an extracting force. The spirit "come[s] back" only if it believes it won't be captured and reprogrammed.
Context matters: Miller wrote in a century that industrialized childhood - schools, tests, social scripts, Cold War conformity - while his plays obsessed over what happens when people are valued for output instead of inner life. This line is a small rebellion against that economy: if you want the real child, stop chasing the version that makes you look like a successful adult.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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