Quotes About Childhood

My grandfather had dominated my childhood out on the island, but my grandmother had been there too, providing the security I didn't recognise or value until I was an adult.

Becoming a child is living toward a second innocence: not the innocence of the newborn infant, but the innocence that is reached through conscious choices.

Jesus makes it clear that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. The innocence that is reached through conscious choices. The Beatitudes offer me the simplest route for the journey home, back into the house of my Father. And along this route I will discover the joys of the second childhood: comfort, mercy, and an ever clearer vision of God. It's a place where I can live in freedom without obsessions and compulsions.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.

Every child begins the world again

By the time she had grown sharper,..., she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play.

She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which became, to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.

Mama doesn't care for me, she said very simply. Not really. Child as she was, her little long history was in the words.

No adult would have done what Bobby did -- but a child is of a different species. By adult standards, a child is not wholly sane.

One child alone might have had violent hysterics. But Charles, who made the first discoveries, was only six, still young enough so that the process of going insane in that particular way wasn't possible for him. A six-year-old is in a congenitally psychotic state; it is normal to him.

A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life.

Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.

Then followed that beautiful season... Summer.... Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.

We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.

The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

and yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

I feel it was just a few years ago I was running around in short pants.

I got a gerontology certificate a million years ago along with my law degree, so I've been interested in older people for many years. Some people grow up with a lot of kids around, but I just grew up with a lot of old people.

If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on 'Alice in Wonderland' and believing in magic for years and years.

As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.

If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma.