Quotes About Childhood

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going.

I was a little fat pudgy kid with big thick glasses, and I was quiet and never said a word, you know -- teachers loved me, straight-A student.

Oh, be assured, fellow teachers, that there is no time in life so favorable to sound conversion as early childhood.

Being conformist and respectful as I was of the grown-up world and its prevailing values, and having no brothers or sisters or friends to counterbalance the personality cult that surrounded me, I had no alternative but to concur, humbly but thoroughly, with the grown-ups' opinion of me.

And my eyes, my mother gave me my eyes, no eyelids, as if they were carved on a jack-o'-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife. I used to push my eyes in on the sides to make them rounder. Or I'd open them very wide until I could see the white parts. But when I walked around the house like that, my father asked me why I looked so scared.

My mother named me Violet after a tiny flower she loved as a girl growing up in San Francisco, a city I have seen only in postcards. I grew to hate my name. The courtesans pronounced it like the Shanghainese word vyau-la—what you said when you wanted to get rid of something. "Vyau-la! Vyau-la!" greeted me everywhere

In my childhood diary I wrote: "I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.

safe there from inquiry and exposure? But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her own, had followed and found her. Her mother's eyes. She had first seen the world through her mother's eyes, and seen herself through her mother's eyes. Children were like kittens, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves except reflected in the eyes of the parents.

But we were lonely. we had nobody to play with. The gay child, the inventive child, the spirited and wild child, was lonely.

One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.

From the time we were little, you treated us as if our ideas mattered.

The though revives in him the oldest memory of his life. A child sees a door closing: without knowing who it is that has just left, he senses it is someone he loves with all his tiny, still mute being.

and if you are a stubborn child, a strong-willed child, you say the almost-ten-year-old version of fuck you something happened all right the fuck put his hands in my legs and rubbed me all over; my legs; *my legs*; me; my; my legs; my; my; my legs; and he rubbed

A child doesn't have to be a prodigy. He has to be a child. The only thing that matters is that he shouldn't become 'stuck' in childishness.

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

Dave couldn't remember the last time a grownup had apologized to him.

What children do love is ghost stories.

Mamma loves morals," she said, at eleven, "Papa loves cats.

And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn't, if they could?).

meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary.

And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn't, if they could?). She is able to count, in English, methodically as a cart climbing uphill, up to the number fourteen—and then the wheels come off: "Twenty-one!" she screams in delight. "Eighteen! Forty-three! Eleventy! Twine!

Despite the gray in his beard, what I felt kept him young were the childhood hobgoblins he retained as pets: his fear of sharks, even in a swimming pool; his fear of mispronouncing "dour." He laughed each time he caught himself, and told me so.

My favorite movie as a child was The Wizard of Oz, and I knew that it began with gray clouds just like these. Every time any black-and-white scene with gray clouds appeared on television, I would clap my hands with glee. No number of disappointments could dissuade me; I always thought it was The Wizard of Oz. And life is actually so threaded with hidden enchantment that, one time, it was.

As we talked, I came to understand that hope is like a happy childhood; it equips its beneficiaries to deal with the traumas that inevitably ensue. It is experienced as primal love. (p.15)