Quotes About Childhood

For now, after a couple of centuries of believing that children were born either bad or blank, children were presumed to be born good. It was the mother's job to protect them from any corrupting forces, to preserve them in a suffocating innocence for as long as possible.

They ushered in what became known as the golden age of children's literature, and remain classics today. As a child myself I felt like I should like them, because they were classics and I was pretentious, but something about them put me off.

Interestingly, the Llewelyn Davies boys were first cousins of gothic novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose own rather gothic childhood is a story in itself, and the reason du Maurier would not permit the publication of her childhood diaries until fifty years after her death.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

It wasn't that the ice-cream man came everyday; he came whenever the child heard his music.

Nina had been told regularly since she was a child that she needed more fresh air, at which she would take her book and clamber up the apple tree at the bottom of their tatty garden, away from the car her father was always tinkering with but had never driven in all the years of her childhood—she wondered what had happened to it—and hide there, braced against the trunk, her feet swinging, burying herself in Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl until she was allowed back inside again.

As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn't know that funny women existed. It wasn't until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny.

Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.

And after, when it was bedtime, I would sing, "We love you, Conrad, oh yes we do. We love you, Conrad, and we'll be true" into the bathroom mirror with a mouthful of toothpaste. I would sing my eight-nine-ten-year-old heart out. But I wasn't singing to Conrad Birdie. I was singing to my Conrad. Conrad Beck Fisher, the boy of my preteen dreams.

Oh, I used to lie all the time as a kid." I didn't think of it as lying, though. I thought of it as playing make-believe. I told Kitty she was adopted and her real family was in a traveling circus. It's why she took up gymnastics.

It's funny how much of your childhood is about proximity.

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

We all look so young. John with his rosy cheeks, Trevor with his chubby ones, Peter with his skinny legs. Underneath the picture I wrote, THE BEGINNING. "Aww," he says tenderly. "Baby Lara Jean and Baby Peter. Where'd you find this?" "In a shoe box." He flicks John's smiling face. "Punk." "Peter!" "Just kidding," he says.

It's funny how much of childhood is about proximity. Like who your best friend is is directly correlated to how close your houses are

Kitty used to hoard raisins; she was probably the most regular kid in kindergarten.

Lara Jean: Kitty, don't act like you never cry. Kitty: I cry over important things. Lara Jean: You cried the other night because Daddy wouldn't let you stay up to watch TV! Kitty: Yes, well that was important to me!

Her eyes never stop shining. It makes me wish I was little again and everything could be solved with a Christmas Day puppy. I

Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

It's funny how much of childhood is about proximity. Like who your best friend is is directly correlated to how close your houses are; who you sit next to in music is all about how close your names are in the alphabet. Such a game of chance.

In the bottom of the desk drawer I found an old composition notebook from my Harriet the Spy days. It was colored in pink and green and yellow highlighter. I'd followed the boys around for days, taking notes in it until I drove Steven crazy and he told Mom on me.

The thought of her getting older, outgrowing her toys, her art set…it makes me feel a bit melancholy. Growing up really is bittersweet.

I've barely thought about this place, and now that it's disappearing, I'm sad. It's like all childhood toys, I suppose. It doesn't become important until you don't have it anymore.

Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders,

my stuffed polar bear hugged to his chest.