Quotes About Childhood

Mi infancia, cuando la recuerdo, se me aparece como una idea de quietud al borde de una inquietud que sería después toda mi vida.

As always she was kitted out in the pristine pastels of baby clothes and her little plimsolls were so white my eyes ached. To look directly at them one would need a piece of cardboard with a hole in it, of the type used for viewing a solar eclipse.

We don't know how to be women because we were taught it was not OK to be girls. Our most natural impulses were thwarted and distorted.

Examining the past can help clarify many of our problems, but healing doesn't occur in the past. It occurs in the present. There is practically a mania these days for blaming the events of our childhood for our current despair. What the ego doesn't want us to see is that our pain doesn't come from the love we weren't given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren't giving in the present.

But it isn't that I'm just Pat. I'm both Pat and the person who knows that being Pat is itself a sign of my sickness. I never totally lose sight of that difference, though the degree to which I'm aware I've regressed varies, and there are times when I don't know a life outside of Pat's child world. (103)

My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell--dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

She knew better than to waste that time. There isn't always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you're being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was little enough to carry, she could hardly bring herself to put him down.

Children seem to think that every pleasant thing has to be a surprise.

There was something that charmed her in the fact that her brother, the one true worldling in the whole tribe of Boughtons, seemed to be asking her for advice, or for wisdom, standing there in the sunlight with the wind hushing in the dusty lilacs of their childhood and laundry swaying on the lines where their school clothes used to hang.

They left a trail of hopscotch behind them, Mellie always thinking of ways to make it harder. They'd be jumping along in the dust, barefoot, with licorice drops in their mouths, feeling as though they had run off with everything in that town that was worth having.

When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...

La infancia no dura para siempre. Algún día lo lamentarás. Pronto serás tan alta como yo.

But the child just lay against her, hoping to stay where she was, hoping the rain wouldn't end. Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain

La peur vient de vos parents et d'autres membres de votre entourage. Ce sont eux qui la construisent en vous. On est tellement innocent au début; on ne sait pas

His wife killed him. Too simple. His childhood, his mother, his father, his siblings? Even if the scars of childhood heal, you never grow out of being vulnerable. Age is no shield against trauma.

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space...

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.

Roger reached the conclusion that the hero of his childhood and youth was one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had excreted onto the continent of Africa.

como la llamábamos yo y mi mamá)

My father was not a hero, my mother wanted to kill people…. so I went out to play in the street.

As for me, I sealed my act of rebellion against my mother's dictatorship by smoking the cigarette I'd stolen from my uncle two weeks earlier. Kofff! Kofff! Kofff!!! It was awful. But this was not the moment to give in. With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye. Now I was a grown-up.

What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.

The transitional object—the teddy bear, stuffed animal, blanket, or favorite toy—makes possible the movement from a purely subjective experience to one in which other people are experienced as truly "other." Neither "me" nor "not-me," the transitional object enjoys a special in-between status that the parents instinctively respect. It is the raft by which the infant crosses over to the understanding of the other.