Quotes About Childhood

Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that's why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with. (Lee 119)

He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good luck pennies, and our lives.

the biography of a childhood which necessarily is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world.

A beating will loosen a child's hide and let him grow.

It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.

Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven't changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That's a confidence. If you don't know what you love, you are lost.

Um. Mom? That's my new bike? I've hardly ridden it?" But she was already figuring out the pedals. I could see her mind and her body synchronizing in the way that is the ultimate truth about remembering, the way we carry our memories all through us.

had unconsciously crossed part of the yard, and was now standing under the lower branches of the mulberry tree, still at an age where anything I couldn't see couldn't see me.

Utopia exists only in one's childhood life.

No subestime a la infancia; no sobreestime a los adultos.

It is likely that our highly geometric homes and playgrounds, which make up so much of what we see during early childhood, calibrate our eyes such that we suffer from such illusions far more than do those in the rest of the world.

Only adults weep with joy. Children don't. They haven't learned how rare moments of true happiness are.

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.

You know you're my best friend, right?' he said. I shrugged. I guessed it was true. Now that I wasn't going to be at the parade, they would all hate me. Everything had been carefully choreographed, and me not being there would throw them all off. I realized that kids like Theo and me weren't supposed to have real friends. We were supposed to be all alone and confused. By being each other's friend, we were defying our laws of gravity.

His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it. They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.

My body never belonged to me. You must have felt that too. If someone wanted to beat me, they could beat me. If someone wanted to lock me in the closet, they could. Childhood is such a perverse injustice, I don't know how anyone survives it without going crazy. But I have a chance to turn the tables. I have a chance to run the streets and be a wealthy woman. No one is ever, ever, ever going to treat me with disrespect again.

They had this angry look about them, as if they had been falling off swings all day.

I don't know why I was upset about not being an adult. It was right around the corner. Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.

If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

It almost makes me cry to tell, what foolish Harriet befell.