Quotes About Childhood

Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside — children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it, they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices.

The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I'm shadowed by doubt that I didn't have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.

Childhood is a state of mind, whether it's a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable.

If to look back is tinted with the honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look sideways at childhood is tainted with the sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend's family or watched the parade of commercials and TV shows that made it clear what a child should look like and what kind of family they should grow up in.

That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.

In the mid-aughts, there was even a short-lived movement called New Sincerity, where artists and writers thought that it would be a radical idea to feel. "To feel" entailed regressing to one's own childhood, when there was no Internet and life was much purer and realer. Though they prized authenticity above all else, they stylized their work in a vaguely repellent faux-naïf aesthetic that dismissed politics for shoe-gazing self-interest.

When I was growing up, black and brown kids were casually racist. Korean kids were casually racist.

The three-year-old who lies about taking a cookie isn't really a liar after all. He simply can't control his impulses. He then convinces himself of a new truth and, eager for your approval, reports the version that he knows will make you happy.

I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.

We built that Wendy House our own selves, for Wendy! And you can't keep a Wendy out of her own Wendy House!

From Colonial times to the present, children have lived with a bewildering variety of caretaking systems. Some, in the bosom of their families, have been looked after by women other than their mothers. Some have been herded into institutions or sent away from home or exposed to substitute mothers in one arrangement or another. America's historical amnesia has let the details of many of these arrangements slip into oblivion, forcing society to make a fresh start again and again.

I was fortunate to have had a happy childhood, one that in all probability was not as perfect as I have chosen to remember. But its memory has helped me survive, and I have used it as a beacon to illuminate the darkness of the tragedy that followed, just as I often use the darkness of past despair to show me the blessings which I might otherwise take for granted.

What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him.

Deny a young boy the right to have a toy gun and you will suppress his destructive urges, and he will turn out to be a homosexual - or worse!

They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.

How they love the old boxcar!

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Dire, schioccando le dita: Go, Stop, quando un ascensore sta per partire o fermarsi, e io sono solo della cabina; dirigere con entrambe le braccia un attacco d'orchestra invisibile che s'ascolta davanti alla radio... sono debolezze che ho dell'infanzia, m'è sempre piaciuto, per scherzo o rivalsa, fingere di condurre chi mi trascina.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

one's own past self (our/his childhood) and of bringing to light the relics of the childhood of humankind itself (Z 4302). Far from wanting to recirculate dead and devitalized forms—either in language or in existence—Leopardi uses the metaphor of fresh fruit preserved in winter,

When I was a kid, for my birthday every year, my mother made me pasta bechamel, which is rigatoni with a white cream sauce.

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...

Mandándome en sueños a mi abuelo, quien me daba bofetones toda la noche y me despertaba con golpes. ¡Y pensar que mi profesión preferida es la de observador de plátanos! —¿Cómo se hace? —Se escoge un plátano, se pone debajo de una hamaca y se observa. Se hacen observaciones interesantísimas. A propósito, me llamo Segundo.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul, but his life.