There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies.

The line frames Neverland as a realm where childhood vitality is in direct tension with adulthood. “Every time you breathe” suggests an effortless, continuous act of living; paired with “a grown-up dies,” it turns ordinary existence into a symbolic force that erodes adult seriousness, convention, and responsibility. In Barrie’s Peter Pan mythology, growing up is often treated as a kind of loss—of imagination, play, and freedom—so the “saying” reads like a darkly comic exaggeration of that theme. It also hints at the cost of perpetual childhood: if childhood persists unchanged, adulthood must be excluded or extinguished, making Neverland’s enchantment inseparable from a refusal of maturity.