Quotes About Childhood

I had to learn how to chop wood actually - I don't think my dad would have let me go chop wood in the backyard growing up.

Bryn, when you were six years old, you tried to bungee jump off a jungle gym by connecting the straps of your overalls to the bars with your shoelaces. Caution has never been your strong suit.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?

When you were a kid," he continued, his voice even and low, "Your mother taught you to observe people. She also taught you not to get attached.

But when he smiled, I still felt seven years old and about three inches tall.

Toby hadn't written a message on the wall of his bedroom. He'd written tens of thousands of words across all the walls in the suite. Toby Hawthorne had kept a diary. His whole life was documented on the walls of his wing of Hawthorne House. He couldn't have been more than seven or eight when he'd started writing.

I can be careful," I said, somewhat disgruntled. "Bryn, when you were six years old, you tried to bungee jump off a jungle gym by connecting the straps of your overalls to the bars with your shoelaces.

Feeling like she really was just seven or eight, Claire sat down on the floor, books all around her, and she opened the last one she'd picked up. Even though it was dark, and even though her eyes couldn't see the words, she knew them. Knew the little prince's story as well as her own. She closed her eyes. She leaned her head forward against the book. And she sobbed.

Libby's hair was dyed again--not one color, but dozens. I thought about what she'd said about her ninth birthday. About the cupcakes my mom had baked for her, and the rainbow colors she'd clipped into her hair, and I wondered how much of her life Libby had spent trying to get that one perfect moment back.

She closed her eyes. Said the four most comforting words she knew: "Once upon a time." An incantation.

Gary had grown up in a small town in Idaho and said it was kid heaven—there was room to breathe, to explore, you knew your neighbors, and your parents didn't mind if you were out late because bad things never happened there. You were safe.

Reggie's earliest memory of her mother began with her mother balancing an egg on its end and ended with Reggie losing her left ear.

I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident.

We did not make this world...and our childhood inclinations about how to succeed in it turn out to be wrong: often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it.

She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and places and things that had gone wrong.

In the first place, he had by that time lost the benefit of his early education: continual hard work, begun soon and concluded late, had extinguished any curiosity he once possessed in pursuit of knowledge, and any love for books or learning. His childhood's sense of superiority

Softened by Time's consummate plush, How sleek the woe appears That threatened childhood's citadel And undermined the years! Bisected now by bleaker griefs, We envy the despair That devastated childhood's realm, So easy to repair.

I think of how emotions seem so magnified when you're a child. Joy is more all-encompassing, disappointments more crushing, hope more palpable.

I have a fleeting fantasy of telling her that procreation isn't a contest, any more than SAT scores and making the cheerleading squad and getting into a good college and all the other things, both big and small, that she turned into a contest when Janie and I were young, going all the way back to whose baby teeth came in first, according to my mother.

That either (a) she uses children to hide her real adult emotions, or (b) she is still a child herself.

It's all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw an airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can't go there because we don't know the secret code, but it's real all the same. Before I didn't know to be mad that we can't open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it.

But for me, Room is a peculiar (and no doubt heretical) battle between Mary and the Devil for young Jesus. If God sounds absent from that triangle, that's because I think that for a small child, God's love is represented, and proved, by mother-love.

When I was four I was watching ants walking up Stove and she ran and splatted them all so they wouldn't eat our food. One minute they were alive and the next minute they were dirt. I cried so my eyes nearly melted off.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.