Quotes About Childhood

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. —LEO TOLSTOI

Is not the clay pit of which you speak that in which you fashioned exceedingly unsymmetrical imitations of rat-pies in your childhood?

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

There are always mystical countries that are a part of one's childhood. Those we remember and visit sometimes when we are asleep and dreaming. They are as lovely at night as they were when we were children. If you ever go back to see them they are not there. But they are as fine in the night as they ever were if you have the luck to dream of them.

When I was a little girl I didn't like the smell of the hops in the carts. Nor in the fields. Je n'aime pas les houblons. No, my God, not a bit. The man that owns the brewery said to me and my sister to go to the brewery and drink the beer, and then we'd like the hops. That's true. Then we liked them all right. He had them give us the beer. We liked them all right then.

Há sempre países mágicos que fazem parte da nossa infância. Os que nos vêm à memória e que visitamos quando dormimos e sonhamos. São tão maravilhosos à noite como quando eramos crianças. Se alguma vez voltamos para os ver, desvanecem-se. Mas à noite não perdem nada da antiga beleza se tivermos a sorte de sonhar com eles

they looked so much the same; perhaps their faces were a little less doughy, more defined. Are they stunted? Am I seeing them the way I will always see them? Am I the keeper of the ghosts of their childhood selves?

The extent to which our childhood relationships nurture or obstruct both sets of needs will determine the vulnerabilities that we bring into our adult relationships

No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers.

Erotic intimacy invites us into a state of unboundedness where we experience a sweet freedom. We get a temporary break from ourselves—the legacies of our childhood, the habits of our relationship, and the constraints of our respective cultures.

Up home we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it," her mother used to say. "We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.

A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.

Learning stamps you with it's moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we wrote notes to each other perhaps on the hour. Our devoted mother would pass them for us, after first running them in a hot oven to kill the germs. They came into our hands curled up and warm, sometimes scorched like toast.

All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Children were allowed to go without chaperone in the afternoons. My sense of making fictional comedy undoubtedly first caught its spark from the antic pantomime of the silent screen, and from having a kindred soul to laugh with.

I can't think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along we both became comics, making each other laugh.

Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe; Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew. Where are you going and what do you wish? the old moon asked the three. We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea. Nets of silver and gold have we, said Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod.

And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies Is a wee one's trundle-bed; So shut your eyes while Mother sings Of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things As you rock on the misty sea.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, and Nod is a little head, And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies is a wee one's trundle-bed. So shut your eyes while Mother sings of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things as you rock in the misty sea, Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? 'Tell me a story.' That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. [179]

Every parent is astonished when their child becomes, quite suddenly, a young person. Only yesterday … Why didn't we notice what was happening when it was happening? Why had we been too busy to enjoy her progress towards the cusp of maturity?

When you're a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up.