Quotes About Childhood

As children, in our own school of life, we soak up clues about our world just as eagerly as small squirrels. Exposure to children's books provides verbal and visual material to help us along the way. So subtle and varied can the lessons be that it may take years before we use everything we absorbed.

Lynda Johnson Robb: Children's books tie together the stages of life. You read them when you are eight or ten or twelve, and then they stay with you. I still have many books that I loved as a child and have kept; I read books to my own children; and now we will share books with my grandchildren. ...Children's books stabilize me, they are my roots; they help me in times of stress. They help me connect to happy memories, to those I love, to the generations in my family. They provide comfort.

Perhaps that was why she drove so fast, because she didn't want the girl to have the same sort of memories of childhood that she'd been left with: the fear in the pit of the stomach and the longing to be home in a familiar place.

He was one of those quiet, sickly bairns. I was a nursery nurse before I married and I knew the sort. Given to asthma and feeling sorry for himself. It didn't help that he was an only child and his mother loved the bones of him.

She'd been an only child of two doting but not terribly emotionally intelligent parents. They were practical – if she asked for something, they gave it to her. But she couldn't ask for what she really needed. She didn't know how.

I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.

My parents weren't involved in show business, but my parents would show me. We'd watch old films in the house. Little film festivals of Westerns and stuff like that when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to be those guys in those movies before I knew what being an actor was.

When I was a little kid, my parents would show me Marx Brothers' films and westerns and stuff like that. That's where all my desire to be an actor comes from and probably most of my understanding of acting comes from for sure.

Those old westerns are the movies I grew up with on Saturday afternoons at the theater.

My parents used to do these little film festivals in our house where we'd watch all the Marx Brothers movies, or Chaplin movies, and a lot of westerns.

The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were 'The Elephant Man,' 'The Magnificent Seven,' 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' and 'Mad Max!' Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies.

I grew up watching Westerns.

I love Westerns and I remember as a kid climbing up on the couch and make it into a saddle and shoot guns and fall off. I would lay there after my death and my mom would tell me to eat lunch and I'd say, 'I'm still dead, Mom!' I was Method, even then.

I was raised on Westerns. They were part of what going into the movies was.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!

I was a fan of westerns growing up. Every boy wanted to ride a horse and be a cowboy.

The first thing that pops into my mind when it comes to playing cowboys is my father, Lloyd Bridges. When I was a little kid, I loved to dress up like a cowboy - put on the boots, hat, and walk around. He was in a lot of westerns, and my dad loved to ride.

I was born in 1950, so there were tons of Westerns on TV by the time I was 6, 7, 8 years old. In terms of television, 'Maverick' and 'Have Gun - Will Travel.' But filmically, classics like 'High Noon' and 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' - that's one of my favorite films.

The first Westerns I saw as a child were those little 8-mm. home movies put out by Castle Films.

I had a huge interior world as a kid: I'd sit on endless wet holidays in Cornwall playing with paper dolls.

My most visceral childhood memory is getting home from hockey. Much of our family time revolved around hockey, and it rains a lot in Perth, and we'd get home tired and wet in our tracksuits, and the smell I'd hold in my nose is of mother's vegetable soup.

When I was a kid, it was always very embarrassing for me if I wet the bed - I was 5 years old. I didn't want my parents or my brothers to find out because they'd bust my chops to no end.

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.

My childhood was great, honestly. I have all these incredible memories of my childhood. I was an only child. I always had all my cousins around. I had my grandparents around. I had my parents around. I had my uncles around - whatever.