Quotes About Childhood

My mum used to listen to Motown. Diana Ross was my first singing teacher, really. I'd just sing along all the time.

And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it - the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed.

Eugene watched the sun wane and redden on a rocky river, and on the painted rocks of Tennessee gorges: the enchanted river wound into his child's mind forever.

Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It's less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.

Those who think that the wisest way to groom a child for spiritual maturity is to isolate him from the evil, corrupted world system or airbrush his childhood environment so much that it exposes only him to the good and never teaches him how to process the bad (or the counterfeit) will set a child up for a life of mediocrity at best and spiritual annihilation at worst.

Childhood is a time when we should move our children from a position of dependence on us to a position of independence from us and toward dependence on God.

I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

My memories begin in a fragrant California backyard, when I was two years old. The yard remains, infinitely smaller than it once seemed but still heady with eucalyptus oil and sudden gusts of ocean air, just as it was in 1956.

He found he was implicitly confident of a way out…and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood—the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn't have things to do like people in the city. We couldn't catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We'd walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers.

Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.

Master Stuart made his letters into paper darts and launched them page by page from the roof of the house-watching them descend and fade into the green ravine below...Some he saved to trade at school for other artifacts of war sent home by other elder brothers like his own-but only the letters mailed from France were worthy of this exchange. They had to have the smell of fire.

In short, every child develops in ways that best allow them to compensate for weakness; "a thousand talents and capabilities arise from our feelings of inadequacy," Adler noted.

Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood experiences resulted in our creation of a self that "moved toward people" or "moved away from people." These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a "wholehearted," or real, person.

A fork in the developmental path leads a child either to imitate adults in order to become more assertive and powerful themselves, or consciously to display weakness so as to get adult help and attention.

after you stop believing in santa claus, the whole world just goes downhill

Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.

And when Aaron called out for him just then, right on time, there was something beautiful about that, too, the way a little kid needed you for everything and wasn't afraid to say so.

Stan and Rudy are grown men. It's too late to shape their minds, to teach them values and a sense of compassion. You have to do that when kids are young, before their personalities harden and they come to love their own ignorance.

As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.

You dig me, don't you? A little boy, he can play like he's a fireman or a cop

Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it.