Quotes About Childhood

Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.

What could be lonelier than a child in space?

Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

Given the age differences, I didn't spend a lot of time with my siblings, except when pressed into service as a babysitter.

She worried how I was doing in kindergarten and sent my father to check on me.

It's all so confusing this brutal abusing They blacken your eyes and then apologize Be daddy's good girl, and don't tell mommy a thing Be a good little boy, and you'll get a new toy Tell grandma you fell from the swing

In the hallway of the house there was the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood, if childhood was the word for that first decade of misery he had suffered through.

The boy was still there, inside the young man's body. It was the same with all of them, all the men she had ever known, in her family or outside it; they reverted to childhood when they were hurt, or sad, or in trouble.

Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

BERRI: "Yes," I remember my first word in American English was "yes," and I remember as a boy speaking quickly, effortlessly, without a trace of an accent in American English. And, just as swiftly, I remember losing my Hebrew vocabulary, as my parents spoke German at home, which I understood but never spoke.

There is no worse preparation for adulthood than having been a child.

Before i launch into a discussion of what a nerd is and where the idea of nerds comes from, I'd like to diclose that when i was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.

There are only two things a child will share willingly — communicable diseases and his mother's age.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

Perhaps a child who is fussed over gets a feeling of destiny; he thinks he is in the world for something important, and it gives him drive and confidence.

There are only two things a child will share willingly: communicable diseases and his mother's age.

I quickly began to long for the days when I had been able to eat my pizza unmolested without Dad insisting on sit-down dinners.

I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what I told everybody I was going to be when I grew up.

When children are very young, you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that, not gloss over them.

There's a definition of narcissism that when a parent is narcissistic, instead of the child seeing himself reflected in the mother's face and the mother's joy, the child of the narcissistic parent feels like, 'What can I do to make her okay, to make her happy?'

For most of my childhood, even through college, there was a lot of feeling very alone. I loved TV, so when those very special episodes of anything came, or when certain characters reflected the world I lived in, I felt connected.

Reflecting back on my childhood, I know it wasn't functional. It was pretty, pretty dysfunctional, and whose isn't?