Quotes About Childhood

One of the big tensions in my life is that I have known the stresses of financial hardship since I was a little kid, and it is the cancer for which I am seeking a cure.

Success will be when every child in the world has access to a service like Childline and knows that someone who cares is just a phone call away

When a small child... I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong.

How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.

Stunt dwarf or destroy the imagination of a child and you have taken away its chances of success in life. Imagination transforms the commonplace into the great and creates the new out of the old.

I have never been a child prodigy. When I think back to my childhood, I can not discern any sign of future success. My only real talent couldn't be found in any curriculum: whistling.

He then closed his eyes as children do in order that they may see in the resplendent night of their own imagination more stars than are visible in the firmament;

and who had the honor to be, as a child, the play-fellow of our king, Louis XIII, whom God preserve! Sometimes their play degenerated into battles, and in these

ah, you are playing with me, like those good, or rather selfish mothers who soothe their children with honeyed words, because their screams annoy them.

Again, the most effective (and least destructive) way to help a child succeed—whether she's writing or skiing, playing a trumpet or a computer game—is to do everything possible to help her fall in love with what she's doing, to pay less attention to how successful she was (or is likely to be) and show more interest in the task. That's just another way of saying that we need to encourage more, judge less, and love always.

Weren't you ever booed at by your mother?!

She shuffled her feet as she was told that she had been taken in by the family as an infant, and that every family in town without a daughter adopted a girl infant or child. She was raised to inherit the laundry and the housekeeping, the cooking and the sorrow, and the kindling of the fire in the early morning when no one else would even think of getting out from beneath the mountains of blankets and quilts.

She's reminded of the time when she would get lost on purpose and her mother would look for her, shouting her name as though calling for a lost dog. Now she burns with regret when she thinks that she hid from her own mother. She should have leapt up and waved her arms. She should have gotten into her mom's car and said, Thank you for rescuing me.

One of the cruelest children had glued a nametag to the mouse's back. Sali had been scrawled in crude letters, but Sally took not the slightest pleasure in the misspelling of her name. She had cried over the little curled-up body, with its tiny whiskers and perfect paws, but when her teacher had asked what was wrong, she'd only shrugged, as though she had lost the power of speech.

I'm really happy that you're here." This is not an outright lie. No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.

THE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves

Midwest childhood, a kidney condition that kept him out of the service, a stint at the Navy Yard before the job at the brewery. She merely nodded, trying to look attentive but actually studying his face, which was pleasant enough, studying his table manners, which were passable but in need of certain refinements—he buttered the back of his entire roll and put the half-bitten piece on the edge of his dinner plate.

But now as she watched her cousin's husband . . . , the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to find that some mistaken memory had caused him—momentarily—to be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob

What is wrong with you?" their father was saying. "Why can't you behave?" Michael—it was not fear on his face, only a kind of disbelief, as if this tall, red-faced, shouting man had materialized out of the wind—looked up to say, "Just playing. I was just playing." But

Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his false self. This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.

They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were

The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.