Quotes About Childhood

Non c'è nessuno che riesce a fuggire del tutto dall'incantesimo dell'infanzia.

As a child my name embarrassed me. Ragged by normally named playmates, I'd bawl. In one school I changed to Elizabeth. This alias was annulled once Daddy heard of it.

Growing up was a maze of light and darkness to me. I never fully understood the purpose of childhood. Baby pictures nonplussed me. It looks like me a little, I thought. But what the hell, I didn't know nuthin'. It ain't that cute. Falling back like that, toothless grimace, mouth bare, legs bent, fat with diapers. And them probably wet.

When I get home, I ask my mother if we can move to a new town. My mother says there's a librarian in every town. I ask if she wants to do my assignment for me. 'I've already been in the first grade,' says my mother.

She knew it in the deepest part of her soul, the part where she was four years old and the world was still a good place, a place where little girls could go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that the world would still be the same safe place when she woke up the next morning.

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms.

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. '…a man's reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child's. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children. (from the author's acceptance speech for the Caldecott award)

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

think of her innocence in

I love San Francisco," she said. "I lived there when I was a child.

Writing the musical City of Angels was a wonderful job I gave myself. I returned to my loves of swing music and black-and-white movies and to the Los Angeles of my boyhood--playwright and tv writer Larry Gelbart

Barbara O'Connor

She would say, "Abracadabra sis boom bah," and there Queenie would be, curled up in the middle of her bed with her chin resting on her toy monkey.

Except for not that Jim." After a while, I started to get a little bit thirsty. That's what happens when chalk sprinkles get in your throat.

In case you haven't noticed, the primary occupation of little girls is sitting still. Stop fidgeting, behave yourself, act like a lady, don't, don't don't --that's what little girls hear the most. But my mother never said those words to me. She said Go! Do! Sing!

And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this.

Television didn't arrive in our household until I was about 10, so my imagination would have been first stirred by the printed word. Comics and the public library.

I just want always to be a little boy and have fun.

When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time.

A little boy gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. As he passes his parents' bedroom he peeks in through the keyhole. He watches for a moment, then continues on down the hallway, muttering to himself, "Boy, and she gets mad at me for sucking my thumb!

Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.

Don't be stupid. You're a child. You don't know what it means to be in love." And she flung open the car door as if she wished she had the strength to rip it from the hinges, and stalked off to the house through the rain. That night, I lay in bed, troubled by what she'd said, blocking out the sounds of argument from my parents' room. Was love what my parents had? Yelling at eachother, worrying about money? Never smiling? Never happy? If that was love, then I didn't want it.

He wondered if all kids-if normal kids-had this moment of epiphany, this sudden sensation of understanding that their parents weren't gods, weren't even kings. They were just people.

I have no reason not to believe any of the things I've been told. I'm told so many things. I was a child. It was an accident. It wasn't my fault. I'm told. I was four years old.