Quotes About Childhood

At home in the nursery, I usually played alone. Actually, I seldom played, I spoke to the wallpaper. The many dark circles in the pattern of the wallpaper seemed like people to me. I made up stories in which they appeared, either I told them the stories or they played with me, I never got tired of the wallpaper people and I could talk to them for hours.

No child, not even the most ordinary, forgets or forgives a single one of the commands inflicted on it.

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Thoughts arise in the hostage's tormented brain. In the hospital, patients feel they are returning to childhood; in prison, they age. The gods blind themselves.

That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Shelley was adopted and I was not, because Shelley had Clue and Life, and I did not

Strange—or is it?—that childish hopes should be answered in the will of God for this now?

We often tend to ignore how much of a child is still in all of us.

Cuando éramos niños, si no cumplíamos la voluntad de los adultos, éramos castigados, y sin embargo, una educación afectuosa habría podido hacernos entrar en razón

Debemos comprender que sólo existen dos miedos: el miedo a caerse y el miedo al ruido. Todos los otros miedos han sido impuestos poco a poco en nuestra infancia por los adultos, pues proyectaban sobre nosotros sus propios miedos y los transmitían así de generación en generación

I was not like other kids, as my mother was not like other mothers. Forever and ever. This I would tell Photoplay, too. To their great admiration, I was sure.

Elizabeth Enright

I thought my aunt was terrific. She had paid attention to me as a person, not a child, and that means everything to an eleven-year-old child who does not want to be seen as a child.

Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter that environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and a premonition of doom. Alma did not embrace her interloper with a warm heart. Then again, why should she have? Who among us has ever warmheartedly embraced an interloper?

My earliest memories are of fear, as are pretty much all the memories that come after my earliest memories.

One's own family and situation are all one knows as a child. Therefore they are, by default, normal. I thought everyone had a papa who sometimes stayed awake all night writing philosophical papers, only to burn them all in a rage in the morning. It was only when I was old enough to notice that other fathers didn't act like my own that I realized the truth.

Life and I became friends some years ago - not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home every day to my apartment. I have a moment now and then - as I peel an orange and take it from kitchen counter to table - when I feel almost a pang of contentment, perhaps at that raw colour.

I've retrained myself since childhood into a kind of diligent goodwill toward life. Life and I became friends some years ago - not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the gift of not belonging.

It is harder to imagine a different self now that I am an adult. As a child, I did imagine myself into other roles. I thought I would become normal, that someday I would be able to do what everyone else did so easily. In time, that fantasy faded. My limitations were real, immutable, thick black lines around the outline of my life. The only role I play is normal.

When you respond to all needs in babyhood, you build the foundation for a happier child.

When my grandmother touches my hair in my sleep, I feel like a lost child. There is never enough of her to comfort me.

His house to me was a child was a heart of happiness. If there is a wonder childhood possesses which makes it forever superior to what shall come after, it is the happy and uncritical love of whatever is happy, place or person, it does not matter which.

But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.