Quotes About Childhood

I don't like games. You're robbing the precious time of children to be children. They need to be in touch with the real world more.

Recent research into the problem shows that three percent of all American males are considered antisocial, while only one percent of women are. Interestingly, little boys tend to show sociopathic traits early in childhood, while girls with antisocial personality disorders rarely exhibit symptoms before the onset of puberty.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

He'd had a dog once, in that way he'd had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting.

I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. During

B]oth my husband and I are the eldest in largish families and both of us had childhoods punctuated by pregnancies, the weeklong disappearance of our mothers, and the arrival of yet another lozenge of a receiving blanket with a red face and a querulous cry. But being supplanted by babies was quite different from being in thrall to them.

The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and quirks are both as individual as a fingerprint and as universal as an open hand.

One of his favorite words now is "Pop." There's no question that it feels good in his mouth, but it's not just that. In the way these things usually go in the house of family, Nana is wallpaper and Pop is a chandelier. "Pop! Pop!" he shouts now, searching for his grandfather.

Glupo je žudjeti za ljepotom. Razumni ljudi nikada ju ne žele za sebe, niti im je stalo do nje kod drugih ljudi. Samo ako je um dobro prosvije?en, a srce na pravome mjestu, nikome nikada nije važna vanjština. Tako su govorili u?itelji našega djetinjstva; a tako i mi govorimo djeci današnjih vremena. Sve vrlo razumno i umjesno, nema sumnje; ali imaju li takve tvrdnje podršku u stvarnim iskustvima?

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

T]here is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child.

In the old days, when I was a little girl, Pim used to tell me stories about "Der bösen Paula."* He had a whole collection of Paula stories, and I adored them all. Now, whenever I go to him for comfort in the middle of the night, he's started telling me Paula stories again, so I've written down the latest one.

Little children such as Anne must never, under any circumstances, know better than the grownups, however many blunders they make.

I'm surprised at my childish innocence. Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again, however much I'd like to be.

I don't know where to start, one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town — still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head.

anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.

The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her child.

The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.

They cramp around our wounds—the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us.

I started to cry then, and I cried for a long time without making much noise. I cried and cried like a little kid.

The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.