Quotes About Childhood

I remember as a little kid, I would always feel comfortable if the light in the crack of my parents' door was on at night. When it went off, that meant they were asleep. Then that terror and the fear of being by myself started to creep in.

When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way.

The people and places that cause terror in childhood cause attraction in adulthood. We end up being repetitively attracted to the same kind of person that obliges us by acting out the same behavior over again.

Childhood is just this amazing place, and in my books, I was trying to express my concern about childhood being eroded. You have kids' TV programs being interrupted by terrorist attacks, and kids are exposed to so much these days.

You initially become funny as a kid because you're looking for attention and love. Psychologists think that's all to do with mother abandonment. I think John Cleese has his depressions, and Terry Gilliam's the same. All of us together make one completely insane person.

Working with Terry Gilliam was magic - I've been watching his films since I was little.

Terry Gilliam is someone I'd always deeply admired. I saw his films when I was a child.

I've listened to Terry Wogan since I was a girl; my parents listened to David Jacobs and Desmond Carrington.

One afternoon when I was 9, my dad told me I'd be skipping school the next day. Then we drove 12 hours from Melbourne to Sydney for the Centenary Test, a once-in-a-lifetime commemorative cricket match. It was great fun - especially for a kid who was a massive sports fan.

I change my socks often, because I had bad bouts of athlete's foot fungus infections as a kid. I may be able to change socks less frequently and not get the fungus. But, I'd rather not run the test to determine just how infrequently I could change socks. I don't feel superstitious about it.

I guess now that I think back, I used to play priest and be a funny priest. I don't know, I grew up in such a Catholic family that I kind of liked to test the boundaries a little bit and I think I had fun watching my mom laugh.

I used to be a model and a medical test subject, though never at the same time. And since we didn't have much money when I was a kid, I know how to fish and hunt for my supper. And I used to win awards in speech in high school, which comes in handy when I speak to 200 people at a writers' conference.

It's really a testament to my parents, because I was active, curious and creative as a child, and my parents nurtured that. But I wouldn't say that I was a professional child actor at all. I was never the breadwinner of my family.

We are raising today's children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.

When I was a child, I spoke like child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became a man, I went on the internet, and spoke like a child, and thought like a child, and reasoned like child.

When I was a kid, I was following black soul music.

I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.

Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall.

The primary fantasy of connection leads to a posture of pseudo-independence in the developing child—"I don't need anyone, I can take care of myself"—yet the irony is that the more the person relies on fantasy, the more helpless he or she becomes in the real world and the more he or she demands to be taken care of.

To people who were not seen or were misunderstood as children, the experience of being seen as a person can be very moving, tantamount to a spiritual experience.

Early in their lives they learned to distrust positive verbal expressions and even physical affection, because more often than not these feelings covertly expressed their parents' need and desperation.

An honest, unloving father or mother will do far less damage to his or her child than a role-playing, "loving" parent. A rejecting and unloving parent will cause a child pain, but a dishonestly rejecting parent causes the child pain and makes him or her feel "crazy.

In unusual cases they may come to act out criminal activities with an absence of guilt because they believe the world somehow owes them what they missed in childhood. The absence of moral considerations or poorly developed conscience seen in character disorders, delinquent, and criminal individuals follows from this type of victimized thinking:

This type of parent causes the child to become unsure of the ability to think and perceive correctly and ultimately causes the son or daughter to develop symptoms of psychological illness.