Quotes About Childhood

anxious HSPs almost all had troubled childhoods. Non-HSPs with troubled childhoods do not show nearly as much depression and anxiety.

in the first two years the child adapts an overall strategy or mental representation of the world which can be quite enduring.

Children of narcissists emerge from this crucible with a common and most serious problem. They feel that they do not have the right to exist.

Like so many of the bits of conversation I recall, the meanings hidden in childhood only become clear now that I write them down. Most were just small lessons, people trying to prove their virtue to each other, but because I wasn't supposed to be listening, I made things out to be more important than they were. Maybe that's why our childhoods seem so big, so resonant, while our adult years slip by like fish in the river Byk.

Although not as exaggerated as the grandiosity of the narcissistically defended child, the codependent child now manifests a measure of grandiosity in her own right—the extraordinary helper.

Into the mud puddle!

My relationship with 'Pollyanna' is a very personal one, because Pollyanna got me through my childhood.

To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

THE GREATEST GIVE YOU CAN GIVE A CHILD IS AN IMAGINATION

If people only realized what a war goes on in a child's mind and heart in a situation of this kind, I think they would try to explain more than they do

But the withholding of information from a child either frustrates him or makes him seek it for himself. And the trouble with the latter method is that it is apt to make the child feel both guilty and dishonest.

I love to fly. I always wanted to fly. It's been one of my dreams since I was 3 years old. I remember saying to my mom, 3 years old, every day, 'I can fly!' Living on the ninth floor, it was dangerous.

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.

Non ho nostalgia della nostra infanzia, è piena di violenza. Ci succedeva di tutto, in casa e fuori, ma non ricordo di aver mai pensato che la vita che c'era capitata fosse particolarmente brutta. La vita era così è basta, crescevamo con l'obbligo di renderla difficile agli altri prima che gli altri la rendessero difficile a noi.

Lila appeared in my life in first grade and immediately impressed me because she was very bad.

Non riuscivo più a essere innocente, dietro i pensieri c'erano altri pensieri, l'infanzia era finita.

Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night. I was small and really my doll knew more than I did.

Olhei para ela, confusa. Com quase treze anos, não sabíamos nada de instituições, leis, justiça. Repetíamos, e às vezes fazíamos com convicção o que tínhamos ouvido e visto à nossa volta desde a primeira infância. A justiça não se realizava na porrada?

I've known how to whistle since I was five years old.

Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille's wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets.

To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.

But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.

Voksne venter på i morgen, bevæger sig i en nutid bag hvilken der er i går eller i forgårs eller højst sidste uge: Resten vil de ikke tænke på. Børn kender ikke betydningen af i går, af i forgårs eller sågar af i morgen, alt er lige nu; gaden er den, døråbningen er den, trapperne er dem, det er mor, det er far, det er dagen, det er natten.