Quotes About Childhoods

Too many memoirs focus on childhoods and it's a bit turgid.

There's a story about David Mamet, a pure genius of human behavior. When told about the complaints of two famous cast members in one of his plays, he joked "If they didn't want to be stars, they shouldn't have had those awful childhoods." It's not an original revelation that some who have weathered great challenges when they were young, created great things as adults...People with the most secret childhoods can make the most public contributions.

Pretty soon...do you realize there'll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody'll give up reading in despair-There'll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they'll have to have a giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading- Seventy Million Million Kotis! - Whoopee! - Everything is free!

Some of those who rest in unvisited tombs may have contributed to the good of the world, but those who preached hatred and fear and guilt and who ruined innumerable childhoods should have been thankful that the hell they preached was only one among their wicked falsifications, and that they were not sent to rot there.

Inside the hole, the red lips say, "we all grew up with the same television shows. It's like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears." The lips say, "The future is not bright.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Contemporary social forces implore us to embrace a mythical polarity—black or white, right or wrong, good or bad—relying on our nostalgia for simpler times, for our own childhoods.

Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children's childhoods--the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that's now in the parents' pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn't have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.

I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet. In other words, the role of traumatized childhoods in most adult psychological disorders is enormous.