Quotes About Childhood

I kind of grew up in a commune, but it wasn't a hippie commune necessarily, but it was a big house with a lot of families, we all lived together and it was the 70s, whatever that means.

I had a friend, and we always used to pretend to be twins. We had this fantasy about going to Hollywood together. We were about four.

There is a feeling of warmth and safety associated with her memory. I believe I spent the rest of my childhood missing her.

believe most people live their lives within a radius of a few miles of their childhood homes," she said. "Not many people go adventuring. And even those who do have to take themselves with them. That must turn out to be a bit of a disappointment.

Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.

The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.

I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.

In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, "Nostos

It's the disparities in your childhood, your life between ass-whippings, that throws past pain into stark relief for a reader. Without those places of hope, the beatings become too repetitive—maybe they'd make a dramatic read for a while, but single-note tales seldom bear rereading.

The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.

her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not

It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I've done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery.

Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he'd made and comparing it for size and integrity to his drool spot from the day before. For

the only parts I remember of my childhood are lies I told myself to feel better

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress.

page and stared at Annie's sparkly drawing of the

Jack opened his eyes. They were wearing their own clothes again. A lightning bug blinked inside the growing darkness of the tree house. Annie picked up Morgan's note. She repeated the rhyme: To find a special magic, You must

The major problem is that the public has been convinced that child abuse is a major problem.

Most of these seemingly collected by Keith's mother: "Some of the pleasantest recollections of my boyhood are of fried jackrabbit, baked jackrabbit, jackrabbit stew, and jackrabbit pie.")

And in their presence I was what every child needs to be for however long it takes to put down the roots of a strong spirit: the object of love unlimited.

I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.