Quotes About Childhood

Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.

Play is also part of developing trust. Play opens the heart and gives delight and focus, like an abacus did when we were young.

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 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.

I came into this world with mercy for nearly everyone, everywhere, and for all cats and dogs at the pound. A fat lot of good it did me. By five years old, I had migraines and the first signs of OCD. By about age six, along with innocence and wonder and truth, I put away childish things. They said to, the people in charge of keeping me alive. I did.

Dread was my governess growing up.

fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue. Grape jelly was best, by Jar, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry, for instance—

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

Taffy is the color of toast and butter.

The crossing sweeper, a boy of about eight or nine years, was still busily pushing manure out of the way to make a clean path for any pedestrian who wished to reach the other side. He seemed to be one of those cheerful souls willing to make the best out of any situation. His skimpy trousers stuck to his legs, his coat was too long for him and gaped around the neck, but his enormous cap seemed to keep most of the rain off his head, except for

Claudia, you've been a very very naughty little girl.

I've watched two-year-old humans with interest for centuries. They're miserable. They rush about, fall down, and scream almost constantly. They hate being human! They know already that it's some sort of dirty trick.

Three generations before I was the one meant for the necklace. I saw him when I was three years old, so clear and strong that he could slip his warm hand in mine, he could lift me in the air, yes, lift my body, but I refused him. I turned my back on him. I told him, You go back to the hell from which you came. And I used my power to fight him.

He didn't have to make the flowers fall," I said. "I taught him not to hurt things that were pretty. I taught him that when we were small.

If you come to bring a swift justice to me for my disobedience, assure me please that you will do your utmost to destroy a spirit which has been my companion since I was a child. This creature, a duplicate of me who has grown with me since before I can remember, now poses a danger to humans as well as myself.

You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care

She was reminded of rainy days in her childhood when she would resign herself to staying in, reading or watching daytime TV, and then in the afternoon the sun would break through unexpectedly and she would think, Oh. I guess I can go outside now. Isn't that…a good thing, I guess.

But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she'd felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl's body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.

Justine's childhood was dark and velvety and it smelled of dust.

Grilled cheese sandwiches were all he knew how to make. He fried them over high heat and they gave off a sharp, salty smell that Willa had learned to associate with their mother's absences—her sick headaches and her play rehearsals and the times she slammed out of the house.

The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

Thinking time," their father called it. Their mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face—so scary to the person's eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann

You did mess them up!' And she had her hairbrush in her hand because I guess she'd been doing her hair and she started hitting me in the head with it, slam on one side of my head, slam on the other side, and I was ducking away and shielding my head—" "Yes, well," Willa said, "it's true she could be—" "You know what's the saddest thing about kids whose mothers are mean to them? It's that even so, their

I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.

She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.