Quotes About Childhood

That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds.

Because adults forgot how porous that border was, the ease with which you could summon monsters and find treasure in any basement. Besides, adults talked to themselves. Was that any more rational?

So, Strand looked at me, and he said, 'You should write about all this someday.' And I said, 'You mean about all the terrible privations and wrenching traumas from my childhood?' And he said, 'Yes, it would be hilarious!' And I said, 'You mean...nonfiction?

I think my mother's and Granny's storytelling had had the same effect upon me when a child, as the reading of books: my mind was stimulated, my creativity encouraged.

After a child's worst day, he or she still looks completely beautiful and innocent in sleep

Don't be frightened, Fishboy

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author's childhood. A writer's childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.

Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels--and I do--why don't I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child?

I have no intention of inflicting all my childhood memories on anyone. Far less do I want to excoriate my old teachers who, in their bungling, unforgettable way, exposed me to the natural world, a world covered in chitin, where implacable realities hold sway.

Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe. Amy and I lived alone with our mother most of the day. Amy was three years younger than I. Mother and Amy and I went our separate ways in peace.

I WALKED. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world's scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route from the school to my friend's house. I mastered chunks of town in one direction only; I ignored the other direction

Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?

When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.

Quand j'étais enfant, le luxe c'était pour moi les manteaux de fourrure et les villas au bord de la mer. Plus tard, j'ai cru que c'était de mener une vie d'intellectuel. Il me semble maintenant que c'est aussi de pouvoir vivre une passion pour un homme ou une femme

By fall, they can read. It happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy's lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, their comes a day when they no longer have to pretend.

I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I'd yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I'd found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books.

It's a gaze of wonder: the same look you see on small children's faces when their fathers take them into deep water at the beach, and it's always a beautiful thing. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food. When we remember what it was that moved us down this road in the first place.

They did not understand him. Poor Dorothy had been long in the situation they seemed only to have arrived at, but she tried to tear the head off her doll and cried what sounded like Gog . — There, you hear, her mother said. Clever girl, she crooned at her. Say God. Say sky. — Koy . — She has said her prayers, Kit said in weariness.

One's first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered.

Mas eu não conseguia deixar de me sentir um pouquinho decepcionado com as coisas do jeito que eram naquela época. Nada contra o que lutar de verdade. Tudo era fácil como tirar doce de criança. Mas a noite ainda era mesmo uma criança.

As a child you are in some ways more acutely aware of what people feel about one another than you are when childhood has come to an end.

While she was at the deanery there sprung up a renewed friendship between her and Lizzie. It was, indeed, chiefly a one-sided friendship; for Lucy, who was quick and unconsciously capable of reading that book to which we alluded in a previous chapter, was somewhat afraid of the rich widow. And when Lizzie talked to her of their old childish days, and quoted poetry, and spoke of things romantic, — as she was much given to do, — Lucy felt that the metal did not ring true.

The case dragged itself on slowly, and little Anna Murray was a child of nine years old when at last the Earl was acquitted of the criminal charge which had been brought against him. During all this time he had been absent. Even had there been a wish to bring him personally into court, the law