Quotes About Childhood

I think the written word is my first love. I was just a very imagination - centered child and a big part of that imaginary life came from reading.

Borderline embarrassing fact: I used to have a pseudo line when I was seven called Zizzy Fashion. I love clothing, and I would eventually like to design as well as act.

I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive.

Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.

I have had a long unabashed love affair with dogs that stretches back to early childhood.

In the first decade of my life, I came to know and love God, as I was raised in a Christian home and community.

There's more monitoring now. Kids don't play unsupervised. Everyone has a phone. Back then, even little kids went out to play on their own, sometimes all day. Kids rode their bikes all around town. I was considered a hardass for doing spot bed checks and having a lot of rules. So people in town were very good to me after it happened

A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy. [Interview with Emma Brockes, The Believer , November/December, 2012]

If there's anything I'm proud of in my work--it's not that I draw better; there's so many better graphic artists than me--or that I write better, no. It's--and I'm not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty, to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.

I remember my own childhood vividly..I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them. (In conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993)

There are] games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate and frustration - all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people — I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images — the emotional quality — of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself — my dreaming life — still lives in the light of childhood.

Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him—and it was still hot.

Se acabó! dijo Max, y envió a los monstruos a la cama sin cenar. Y Max, el rey de todos los monstruos se sintió solo y quería estar donde alguien lo quisiera más que a nadie. Entonces desde el otro lado del mundo lo envolvió un olor de comida rica y ya no quiso ser el rey del lugar donde viven los monstruos.

Your childhood is spent being nurtured, protected, loved unconditionally while your adulthood is spent searching in vain for substitutes. Mate, government, God…

challenging readers to watch these old movies "with the eyes of a six-year-old child, eyes that flick constantly from the terror on the screen to the dark, rustling trees outside the window.

Just as a happy child cannot mis-hug, the sincere heart cannot mis-pray.

What child, whilst summer is happening, bothers to think that summer will end? What child when snow is on the ground stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless?

I never met a teddy I didn't like.

Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

Those are facts, but facts, to a child, are merely words to memorize.

Childhood's logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute).